“Don’t you s’pose I looked forward to casting anchor?” he demanded warmly.  “Seemed like the time never would come.  I was always trying to speculate a little so as to make something besides my skipper’s pay and share.  That—­that’s why I got bit in that Sea-Gold proposition.  That feller’s prospectus did read mighty reasonable, Prudence.”

“I know it did, Ira,” she agreed cordially.  “I believed in it just as strong as you did.  You warn’t none to blame.”

“Well, I dunno.  It’s mighty nice of you to say so, Prue.  But they told me afterward that I might have knowed that a feller couldn’t extract ten dollars’ wuth of gold from the whole Atlantic Ocean, not if he bailed it dry!”

“We’ve got enough left to keep us, Ira.”

“Just about.  Just about.  That is just it.  When I was taken down with this rheumatiz and the hospital doctors in New York told me I could never think of pacing my own quarter no more, we had just enough left invested in good securities for us to live on the int’rest.”

“And the old place, here, Ira,” added his wife cheerfully.

“Which ain’t much more than a shelter,” he rejoined rather bitterly.  “And just as I say, it isn’t fit for two old folks like us to live alone in.  Why, we can’t even raise our own potatoes no more.  And I never yet heard of pollack swimmin’ ashore and begging to be split and dried against winter.  No, sir!”

“The Lord’s been good to us, Ira.  We ain’t never suffered yet,” she told him softly.

“I know that.  We ain’t suffering for food and shelter.  But, I swan, Prue, we be suffering for some young person about the house.  Now, hold on!  ’Twarn’t for us to have children.  That warn’t meant.  We’ve been all through that, and it’s settled.  But that don’t change the fact that we need somebody to live with us if we’re going to live comfortable.”

“Oh, dear, if my niece Sarah had lived!  She used to stay with me when she was a gal and you was away,” sighed Prudence.

“But she married and had a gal of her own.  She brought her here that time I was home after my first v’y’ge on the Susan Gatskill.  A pretty baby if ever there was one.”

“Ida May Bostwick!  Bostwick was Sarah’s married name.  I heard something about Ida May only the other day.”

“You did?” exclaimed Cap’n Ira, much interested.

“Yes, Ira.  Annabell Coffin, she who was a Cuttle, was visiting his folks in Boston, and she learned that Sarah Bostwick’s daughter was working behind the counter in some store there.  She has to work for her livin’, poor child.”

“I swan!” ejaculated the captain.

Much as he had been about the world, Cap’n Ira looked upon most mundane affairs with the eyes of the true Cape man.  Independence is bred in the bone of his tribe.  A tradesman or storekeeper is, after all, not of the shipmaster caste.  And a clerk, working “behind the counter” of any store, is much like a man before the mast.