"I'll care for him," answered Browne unbendingly. "Away with the canoe! Good-by, captain. My tobacco will be ready for you."
And Poll, the convict, as she leaned over the rail and watched the fast-receding canoe pitching up and down on the seas, said, "Lawr!"
SCENE III.
The time is the late afternoon of the same day, and the place is again Sanford Browne's plantation.
Judith Browne, having exhausted her experiments on the frock, the bonnet, and the hoop petticoat bought for her in London and sent like the proverbial pig in a poke, had taken to watching the Yankee peddling sloop, which, having lain for an hour at Patterson's on the Virginia shore, was now heading for the Browne place. It was pretty to see the sloop heel over under a beam wind and shoot steadily forward, while the waves dashed fair against her weather side and splashed the water from time to time to the top of her free board. It was a pleasant sight to mark her approach by the gradual increase in her size and the growing distinctness with which the details of her rigging could be made out. At length, when her bow appeared to Judith Browne to be driving so straight on the bank that nothing could prevent the vessel's going ashore Captain Perkins called to his only man, standing at the helm, "Hard down!" and the sloop swung her nose into the waves, and gracefully rounded head into the wind just in time to lie close under the bank, rocking fore and aft like a duck. As soon as she had swung into the wind enough for her sail to flap, the captain called to the boy who was the third member of the crew to let go the halyards; and as the sail ran rattling down, the captain heaved the anchor at the bow with his own hands. Then a plank was run out, a line made fast forward, and Perkins climbed the bank and greeted Mrs. Browne. His manner combined strangely the heartiness of the seaman with the sinuous deference of the peddler. His speech was that which one hears only in the most up-country New England regions and among London small shopkeepers. The uttering of his vowel sounds taper end first greatly amused his customers in the Chesapeake regions, while their abrupt clipping of both vowels and liquids was equally curious to Perkins, who regarded all people outside of New England as natives to be treated with condescending kindness alike for Christian and for business reasons, and as people who were even liable to surprise him by the possession of some rudimentary virtues in spite of their unlucky outlandishness.
"Glad to see yeh again, Mis' Braown," he said when he reached the top of the bank. "Where's Mr. Braown?"
"He's gone down to the Nancy Jane. Won't you come in, Captain Perkins? Come in and sit down a while."
"Wal, yes. And how's your little gal?" Seeing a dubious look on Mrs. Browne's face, he said: "Or is it a boy, now? I call at so many houses I git confused. Fine child, I remember."
"The lad's gone off with his father," said Judith, giving Perkins a seat in the passage.
After more preliminary talk the peddler got to his main point, that he had lots of nice notions and things this year cheaper'n they could be had in London. All the folks agreed that his things were "cheaper, considerin' quality, Mis' Braown, than you could git 'em in London."