"You 've forgot what you sot out on!" says John, interrupting her at last; "and you kerried me away so, I was a-forgittin' on 't too. Howsever, it 's no odds, as I know on,--you make whatever you touch so interestin'!"
"O Captain! how you do warnish me up! I shall certainly wacate the premises when we come to port, if you don't stop sich things!--that is, if there's a single westige o' clear sky. But we were talking of the walue of money, was n't we?" She cast down her eyes again, and spoke with a sweet seriousness. "I walue money," she says, "when I see I can make another happy with it." And then she says her lot in life has been a wery lonely and sad one,--wersatile, but on the whole lonely, sometimes to the wery werge of despair!
"You don't say?" says John. "I certainly should n't 'a' thought it possible! Why, you don't mean to say you 've allers been alone in the world?"
Then she tells him how she thought she fell in love, at seventeen, with a green-grocer that turned out to be a miserable wagabond, inwesting all her earnings in whiskey and rum, and drinking them himself.
"The villain!" cried John;--and then, finding that he had not done justice to his feelings, he repeated, with great stress of indignation, "The willain! the black-hearted willain! But he never dared to lay violent--wiolent, I mean--hands onto you!"
"Dear me, how my heart wibrates!" says the woman,--"not so much with the memory of what I have suffered as that--that anybody should manifest such a--such a wery kind feeling toward me now!"
"How anybody that seen you should 'a' helpt from doin' on 't," says the boatman, "is awful curus to me!"
"Law mercy, how selfish I am, never offering you a seat all this while!" says the artful woman. And she hitched along, and smoothed out the jacket.
"Well, whatever your trouble 's been," says John, "I hope your red on 't!"
It was an ingenious method of saying he hoped the vagabond was out of the way.
He turned toward her as he spoke, and the wind once more fluttered the gay ribbons in his face. She lifted her hand to draw them back. "Don't you be a-mindin' on 'em," says John; "they're just as sweet as rose-leaves, and I like to hev em a-blowin' over me so."
You may smile, reader, if you will, but you would not smile if you had seen the soul yearning in the eyes of the man, if you had heard the pleading in the sad sincerity of his tone. He was fifty years old now, and I dare say a woman's ribbon had never touched him till then. He was wrinkled and gray, and old to look upon, but his heart in its tender sentiment was as fresh and young as a boy's.