“De young missus used to beat me a right smaht,” he recalled with an amused smile.  “I b’longed to her, y’see.  She was a couple o’ years younger’n me.  I mind I used to be hangin’ ’round de kitchen, watchin ’em cook cakes an’ otha good things.  W’en dey be done, I’d beg for one, an’ dey take ’em off in de otha room, so’s I couldn’t steal any.

“Soon as de young missus be gone, I go an’ kick ovah her playhouse an’ upset her toys.  When she come back, she be hoppin’ mad, an staht beatin’ me.

“‘Jessie,’ her ma’d say, ‘you’ll kill Buddy, beatin’ him dat way.’

“‘I don’t care,’ she say, ‘I’ll beat him to death, an’ git me a bettah one.’

“I’d roll on de flo’ an’ holler loud, an’ preten’ she hurt me pow’ful bad.  By’m by, when she git ovah her mad spell, she go off in da otha room an’ come back sid some o’ dem good things fo’ me.”  The old man’s eyes twinkled.  “Dat be w’at I’se atter all de time,” he explained.

The perils of a life at sea are not as great as fiction writers sometimes indicate, according to this old sea dog.  He says that in all his voyages, he has been in only one serious wreck.  That was on a reef of coral keys off the Bahamas.

“Day say dey ain’t no wind so bad but what it blows some good to somebuddy,” observed the old man.  “Dat same wind what land us on de rocks done blow me to de bes’ woman in de worl’.  Ah reckon.”

He chewed slowly, as he gazed out over the dingy housetops toward the mass of feathery clouds, which must have been floating over the rocky shoals off Nassau.

“She was de daughter o’ de wreckin’ mahater, a Nassau niggah by de name o’ Aleck Gator.  W’en de crew done got us off de shoal and was towin’ de wreck in, dere she was, stahndin’ on de dock, waitin’ fer her daddy.  Big, overgrown gal, black an’ devilish-lookin’, noways handsome; but somehow I jes’ couldn’t keep my eyes offen her.  I notice she keep eyein’ me, too.

“W’en we gits ashore, I didn’t lose no time gittin in a good word f’ mahse’r.  ‘Fore I knowed it, we was talkin’ ‘bout wha’ we gwine live ...  Fifty-one years is a mighty long time to stick to one woman, ’specially w’en you be’n lookin’ over so many ‘fore makin’ up yo’ mind ...  Dis is her.”

Uncle Dave extended a tinted photograph.  His gnarled fingers trembled as he handed it over, and there was a suspicious softness in the lines of his wrinkled old face, as he looked fondly at the likeness of the stolid, dark features.

“Hit be’n mighty lonesome since she done lef’ dis worl’ fo’ year ago,” he said with feeling, as he carefully wrapped up the picture and put it away.

Uncle Dave has definite ideas of his own regarding domestic economy.  “Trouble wid young folks nowadays is dey don’t have no good unnerstahndin’ ’fore dey gits married.  ’Fore we ever faces de preacher, I tells her she ain’t gittin’ no model man fer a husban’.  I lake my likker, an’ I gwine have it w’en I wants it.