Many is the man who has come aboard my ship a determined
bachelor in his notions, who has left it at the end of the passage ready
to marry the first pretty young woman he fell in with."
As Eve had too much of the self-respect of a lady, and of the true dignity
of her sex, to permit jokes concerning matrimony, or a treatise on love,
to make a part of her conversation, and all the gentlemen of her party
understood her character too well, to say nothing of their own habits, to
second this attempt of the captain's, after a vapid remark or two from the
others, this rally of the honest mariner produced no _suites_.
"Are we not unusually low, Captain Truck," inquired Paul Blunt, with a
view to change the discourse, "not to have fallen in with the trades? I
have commonly met with those winds on this coast as high as twenty-six or
twenty seven, and I believe you observed to-day, in twenty-four."
Captain Truck looked hard at the speaker, and when he had done, he nodded
his head in approbation.
"You have travelled this road before, Mr. Blunt, I perceive. I have
suspected you of being a brother chip, from the moment I saw you first put
your foot on the side-cleets in getting out of the boat. You did not come
aboard parrot-toed, like a country-girl waltzing; but set the ball of the
foot firmly on the wood, and swung off the length of your arms, like a man
who knows how to humour the muscles.
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