"Are you seventy?"

"I swan! I dunno."

"Well, you were on the Old Dove with Skipper Jimmie Stone, weren't you?"

"Sartin."

"You were on the Constitution, when she fought the Guerriere, weren't
you?"

How could he deny it?

"Well, weren't you with Captain Lovett on four of his three-year trading
voyages to Australia and China?"

"Course I was."

"How about those trips 'round the Horn, on the clipper ship 'Mary Jane'
from '49 to '55?"

"I was thar." They kept relentlessly on down the list, and then showed
him the tally. Allowing for infancy, an abbreviated boyhood on land, and
the time they had known him since he had quit the sea, he was one
hundred and thirty-five years old. The showing did not disconcert him,
however. He was interested, but he had told those stories so often and
had come to believe each of them so implicitly that he could not doubt
them in the aggregate. He simply exclaimed: "Well, I'll be darned! I
feel like a young chap o' sixty."