“Hum.”
“He seems to be a nice, steady, well-informed young man.”
“Is that the way it strikes you, Isaac?”
“Yes.”
“The fact is, Isaac,” beginning to pick the leaves of a beech limb, which hung over the float, and chew them up, “I am ready and willing, and count it a privilege to do all I can for this boy, and his father’s family; but whether building a vessel, and putting him in her, is the best way to do it, I am not clear.”
While they were engaged in this conversation, the boat had drifted under the limbs of a birch, that had never regained its upright position after being bent down by the ice and snow of the previous winter.
“What have you got that’s good in that red box, Isaac?”
“I’ve got a chicken, boiled eggs, bread, butter, cheese, and doughnuts,” he replied, placing the box on the middle thwart of the boat, and removing the cover.
“There’s something to wash it down,” said the captain, unrolling a jug, carefully wrapped in the folds of his long jacket. “That’s some of the coffee I brought home in the Ark; it’s warm, too. We might as well eat now as any time, for by the tide it can’t be far from noon.”
Uncle Isaac twisted one of the long, slender limbs of the birch into a string, and making it fast to a thole-pin hole, it held the boat stationary, while the two friends, sitting face to face in the warm sunshine, gossipped and ate; and having eaten nothing since three o’clock that morning, evidently enjoyed the repast, the warm sunshine, and the sheltered nook, so highly as to wish to prolong the pleasure, and ate very deliberately, till the meal was brought to an abrupt termination by the entire consumption of the contents of both box and jug.