The Captain respected his wife’s wishes, but put in an ardent plea for his own name, Hiram.

“There’s been a Hiram Baker in our family ever since Noah h’isted the main-r’yal on the ark,” he declared.  “I’d kinder like to keep the procession a-goin’.”

They compromised by agreeing to make the baby’s Christian name Hiram and to add a middle name selected at random from the Scriptures.  The big, rickety family Bible was taken from the center table and opened with shaking fingers by Mrs. Baker.  She read aloud the first sentence that met her eye:  “The son of Joash.”

“Joash!” sneered her husband.  “You ain’t goin’ to cruelize him with that name, be you?”

“Hiram Baker, do you dare to fly in the face of Scriptur’?”

“All right!  Have it your own way.  Go to sleep now, Hiram Joash, while I sing ‘Storm along, John,’ to you.”

Little Hiram Joash punched the minister’s face with his fat fist when he was christened, to the great scandal of his mother and the ill-concealed delight of his father.

“Can’t blame the child none,” declared the Captain.  “I’d punch anybody that christened a middle name like that onto me.”

But, in spite of his name, the baby grew and prospered.  He fell out of his crib, of course, the moment that he was able, and barked his shins over the big shells by the what-not in the parlor the first time that he essayed to creep.  He teethed with more or less tribulation, and once upset the household by an attack of the croup.

They gave up calling him by his first name, because of the Captain’s invariably answering when the baby was wanted and not answering when he himself was wanted.  Sophronia would have liked to call him Joash, but her husband wouldn’t hear of it.  At length the father took to calling him “Dusenberry,” and this nickname was adopted under protest.

Captain Hiram sang the baby to sleep every night.  There were three songs in the Captain’s repertoire.  The first was a chanty with a chorus of

     John, storm along, storm along, John,
     Ain’t I glad my day’s work’s done.

The second was the “Bowline Song.”

     Haul on the bowline, the ‘Phrony is a-rollin’,
     Haul on the bowline! the bowline haul!

At the “haul!” the Captain’s foot would come down with a thump.  Almost the first word little Hiram Joash learned was “haul!” He used to shout it and kick his father vigorously in the vest.

These were fair-weather songs.  Captain Hiram sang them when everything was going smoothly.  The “Bowline Song” indicated that he was feeling particularly jubilant.  He had another that he sang when he was worried.  It was a lugubrious ditty, with a refrain beginning: 

     Oh, sailor boy, sailor boy, ’neath the wild billow,
     Thy grave is yawnin’ and waitin’ for thee.

He sang this during the worst of the teething period, and, later, when the junior partner wrestled with the whooping cough.  You could always tell the state of the baby’s health by the Captain’s choice of songs.