“I'll take it,” answered Uncle Larry. “We made 427 the fifth day last year.” It was Uncle Larry's seventeenth visit to Europe, and this was therefore his thirty-fourth voyage.
“And when did you get in?” asked Baby Van Rensselaer. “I don't care a bit about the run, so long as we get in soon.”
“We crossed the bar Sunday night, just seven days after we left Queenstown, and we dropped anchor off Quarantine at three o'clock on Monday morning.”
“I hope we sha'n't do that this time. I can't seem to sleep any when the boat stops.”
“I can, but I didn't,” continued Uncle Larry, “because my stateroom was the most for'ard in the boat, and the donkey-engine that let down the anchor was right over my head.”
“So you got up and saw the sun rise over the bay,” said Dear Jones, “with the electric lights of the city twinkling in the distance, and the first faint flush of the dawn in the east just over Fort Lafayette, and the rosy tinge which spread softly upward, and——”
“Did you both come back together?” asked the Duchess.
“Because he has crossed thirty-four times you must not suppose he has a monopoly in sunrises,” retorted Dear Jones. “No; this was my own sunrise; and a mighty pretty one it was too.”
“I'm not matching sunrises with you,” remarked Uncle Larry calmly; “but I'm willing to back a merry jest called forth by my sunrise against any two merry jests called forth by yours.”
“I confess reluctantly that my sunrise evoked no merry jest at all.” Dear Jones was an honest man, and would scorn to invent a merry jest on the spur of the moment.