“Aye. Then she come across the bay in a rowboat, and I was diggin' clams, and she says. 'If you dasn't come to the house, what dast you do?' I see the minister down the beach, diggin' clams, an' he had eleven children, he had, diggin' clams, and she looked at him too, and I says, 'I das' say he'd rather'n dig clams.' We went fishin' afterward, and got eight barrel o' herring.”
“You don't say!” says Andrew McCulloch, puffing and looked surprised.
Uncle Abimelech kept his eyes fixed on the kettle and wandered away in his mind. Then Captain Tom roused himself, and spoke thoughtfully.
“It was different with me,” he said. “Her parents wanted another one. He was richer, but nowise so good-looking. I says to her, 'Cut and run!' but she wouldn't, as being undutiful. She took him. His name was Jones. He went bankrupt, and got paralysis, and is living still. Her parents died in different poorhouses.”
Pemberton looked surprised at this too, and then thoughtful, and then he winked at Stevey Todd, who passed it back.
“I got my wife out of the back window of a boarding school, second story,” said Pemberton. “She came down the blinds.” And he wiped his face with his coat sleeve.
“Mine came through the cellar,” said Stevey Todd. “She brought a pot of jam in her pocket, or else,” he added cautiously, “or else it was pickles. It might've been pickles, but it runs in my mind it was jam.”
But Pemberton's wife had been a widow first, as he once told me, and Captain Tom's and Stevey Todd's romances didn't run that way, by accounts. But as to Uncle Abimelech, it may be what he said was true.
They all fell silent again, except Andrew McCulloch, who whistled: “Whew, whew, whew!” and pulled his whiskers, now this one and that, and said:
“Bless my soul! You don't mean it!” and fidgeted in his chair. “I didn't suppose it was so usual, I didn't! God bless my soul!”