"Good-by, Alfred. Come again," she said, cheerfully.

"Mother, here's your beef tea," said a brief voice.

Alfred Price fled. He met his son just as he was entering his own house,
and burst into a confidence: "Cy, my boy, come aft and splice the
main-brace. Cyrus, what a female! She knocked me higher than Gilroy's
kite. And her mother was as sweet a girl as you ever saw!" He drew his
son into a little, low-browed, dingy room at the end of the hall. Its
grimy untidiness matched the old Captain's clothes, but it was his one
spot of refuge in his own house; here he could scatter his tobacco ashes
almost unrebuked, and play on his harmonicon without seeing Gussie wince
and draw in her breath; for Mrs. Cyrus rarely entered the "cabin." "I
worry so about its disorderliness that I won't go in," she used to say,
in a resigned way. And the Captain accepted her decision with
resignation of his own. "Crafts of your bottom can't navigate in these
waters," he agreed, earnestly; and, indeed, the room was so cluttered
with his belongings that voluminous hoop-skirts could not get
steerageway. "He has so much rubbish," Gussie complained; but it was
precious rubbish to the old man. His chest was behind the door; a
blowfish, stuffed and varnished, hung from the ceiling; two colored
prints of the "Barque _Letty M_., 800 tons," decorated the walls; his
sextant, polished daily by his big, clumsy hands, hung over the
mantelpiece, on which were many dusty treasures--the mahogany spoke of
an old steering-wheel; a whale's tooth; two Chinese wrestlers, in ivory;
a fan of spreading white coral; a conch-shell, its beautiful red lip
serving to hold a loose bunch of cigars. In the chimney-breast was a
little door, and the Captain, pulling his son into the room after that
call on Mrs. North, fumbled in his pockets for the key. "Here," he said;
("as the Governor of North Carolina said to the Governor of South