“It’s ‘es-teemed lady’” he admonished the captain.  “You said ‘steamed.’  M’lissy ain’t cooked.  An’ you stutter yet when you come to that word right after painful.  Can’t you say it plainer?”

“‘Trep-trep-trepidation,’” stammered the captain again.  “Say it yourself,” he dared Abner.  “I’ll bet you can’t do no better.”

“I ain’t tryin’ to say it,” Abner reminded him with dignity.  “If I was I’d make it out someway.  I wouldn’t be beat by any word ever put in a dictionary.  You’re doin’ better,” he complimented the captain, after the sixth recital.  “Mebbe you’ll git it after awhile.”

But when Captain Enoch felt that his monitor was most needed and had begun to look hopefully forward to a one hundred per cent rehearsal, Abner took a sudden notion to go sword fishing.

“The time to go sword fishin’ is when sword fish are due,” he insisted with Solomonic wisdom.  “I’m going to be off Nantucket shoals by daybreak to-morrow.”

“But how be I goin’ to git along without you to boost me on that proposal?” demanded the captain.  “If you had any feelin’ at all, you wouldn’t leave me just when I need you most.”

Abner considered the situation for some moments.

“I got it,” he declared joyfully.  “Buy a phonygraft an’ some blank records an’ keep sayin’ that proposal just the same as you do to me.  You can hear yourself poppin’ as plain as you can hear a bell buoy ring-in’.  It takes me to plan things,” he added with becoming pride.

Captain Enoch went to Boston and visited his vessel, as he told Mrs. Crowell when he returned.  Also, he visited the “phonygraft man,” a circumstance he failed to relate.

When Mapleville’s express agent delivered at the Crowell home a large bundle addressed to Captain Enoch Burgess, the captain smuggled it surreptitiously upstairs, closed the windows of his room and stuffed the key hole with a wad of paper.

It was some hours before he succeeded in mastering the various adjustments of the phonograph, and ventured to hear himself “pop.”  Listening with critical intentness, he discovered that two sentences were missing.  Grimly he tried again.  The word that had been so long his stumbling block suddenly showed its vindictiveness once more.

“‘It is with painful trep-trep-’ darn it!” repeated the phonograph with startling distinctness.

Wrathfully the captain snatched the record and hurled it under the bed.  A number of others soon kept it company.  The next day the captain went to Boston again.  This time even the phonograph dealer was astonished at the number of blank records Captain Enoch demanded.

With reckless abandon the captain proceeded to use the new supply of records.  Dripping with perspiration from the heat of his closely-shut room and from his strenuous mental exertion, he finally came to the last one, and word by word and sentence by sentence heard himself make an absolutely correct and flawless proposal to Miss Macy.