"In what manner?" asked I, stiffly. I remembered that Captain Gray had asked me if I were a tourist.
They all laughed again.
"Oh, especially on samovars."
My face burned suddenly.
"On samovars!"
"Yes. You see he gets a tourist into his warehouses and shows him samovar after samovar—fifty or sixty of them—and tells him that every one is sold. He puts on the most mournful look.
"'This one was twenty-five dollars,' he says. 'A captain on a government cutter bought them to take to Boston.' Then the tourist gets wild. He offers five, ten, twenty dollars more to get one of those samovars. He always gets it; because, you see, Gray wants to sell it to him even worse than he wants to buy it. It always works."
We walked over the hills to Dutch Harbor—once called Lincoln Harbor. There is a stretch of blue water to cross, and we were ferried over by a gentleman having much Fourth-of-July in his speech and upon his breath.
His efforts at politeness are remembered joys, while a sober ferryman would have been forgotten long ago. But the sober ferrymen that morning were like the core of the little boy's apple.