Without stopping to inquire, as I was tempted to do, why he was more likely to recognize me in Singapore than anywhere else, I invited him to come at once up to the Nutter House, where I insured him a warm welcome from the Captain.

“Hold steady, Master Tom,” said Sailor Ben, slipping the painter through the ringbolt and tying the loveliest knot you ever saw; “hold steady till I see if the mate can let me off.  If you please, sir,” he continued, addressing the steersman, a very red-faced, bow-legged person, “this here is a little shipmate o’ mine as wants to talk over back times along of me, if so it’s convenient.”

“All right, Ben,” returned the mate; “sha’n’t want you for an hour.”

Leaving one man in charge of the boat, the mate and the rest of the crew went off together.  In the meanwhile Pepper Whitcomb had got out his cunner-line, and was quietly fishing at the end of the wharf, as if to give me the idea that he wasn’t so very much impressed by my intimacy with so renowned a character as Sailor Ben.  Perhaps Pepper was a little jealous.  At any rate, he refused to go with us to the house.

Captain Nutter was at home reading the Rivermouth Barnacle.  He was a reader to do an editor’s heart good; he never skipped over an advertisement, even if he had read it fifty times before.  Then the paper went the rounds of the neighborhood, among the poor people, like the single portable eye which the three blind crones passed to each other in the legend of King Acrisius.  The Captain, I repeat, was wandering in the labyrinths of the Rivermouth Barnacle when I led Sailor Ben into the sitting-room.

My grandfather, whose inborn courtesy knew no distinctions, received my nautical friend as if he had been an admiral instead of a common forecastle-hand.  Sailor Ben pulled an imaginary tuft of hair on his forehead, and bowed clumsily.  Sailors have a way of using their forelock as a sort of handle to bow with.

The old tar had probably never been in so handsome an apartment in all his days, and nothing could induce him to take the inviting mahogany chair which the Captain wheeled out from the corner.

The abashed mariner stood up against the wall, twirling his tarpaulin in his two hands and looking extremely silly.  He made a poor show in a gentleman’s drawing-room, but what a fellow he had been in his day, when the gale blew great guns and the topsails wanted reefing!  I thought of him with the Mexican squadron off Vera Cruz, where,

‘The rushing battle-bolt sung from the three-decker out of the foam,’

and he didn’t seem awkward or ignoble to me, for all his shyness.

As Sailor Ben declined to sit down, the Captain did not resume his seat; so we three stood in a constrained manner until my grandfather went to the door and called to Kitty to bring in a decanter of Madeira and two glasses.

“My grandson, here, has talked so much about you,” said the Captain, pleasantly, “that you seem quite like an old acquaintance to me.”