"You will never do that, Bill; but you might settle down in Rochester, and buy half a dozen barges, with a tip-top one you would sail yourself. You might have a couple of men and a cabin forward, and a nice roomy place for yourself and me aft; and you could just steer when you liked, or sit down and smoke your pipe and watch her going through the fleet as we worked through the swatchway. That would be more your sort, Bill, and mine too. I know you have money enough laid by to get such a barge."
"That is so, Betsy. I allow that I could do that. I have been thinking of it for some time, but somehow or other one never works one's self up to the right point to give it all up of a sudden and cut the old place. Well, I suppose one of these days I shall do it, if it is only to please you."
"It would please me, you know, Bill. I don't see no harm in running the kegs or the bacca—it's what the people about here have been doing for hundreds of years—but I don't like this other business. You don't know what is in the cases, and you don't ask, but there aint much difficulty in guessing. And I don't much like this business of the child. I did not like it at all at first; but when I found that he had no father nor mother as he knew of, and so it was certain that no one was breaking their heart about him, I did not mind it; and I have taken to him, and he has pretty nearly forgotten about his home, and is as contented as if he had been here all his life. I have nothing more to say about him, though it is as certain as eggs is eggs that it has been a bad business. The boy has been cheated out of his money, and if his friends ever find him it is a nice row that we shall get into."
"You need not bother yourself about that," the man said; "he aint more likely to be found here than if he was across the seas in Ameriky. We have had him near nine months now, and in another three months, if you were to put him down in front of his own house, he would not know it. Everyone about here believes as he is my nevvy, the son of a brother of yours who died down in the Midlands, and left him motherless. No one asks any questions about him now, no more than they does about Joshua. No, no; we are all right there, missis; and the hundred pounds that we had down with him, and fifty pounds a year till he gets big enough to earn his own grub on the barge, all helps. Anyhow, if something should happen to me before I have made up my mind to quit this, you know where the pot of money is hidden. You can settle in Rochester, and get him some schooling, and then apprentice him to a barge-owner and start him with a barge of his own as soon as he is out of his time. You bear it in mind that is what I should like done."
"I will mind," she said quietly; "but I am as likely to be carried to the churchyard as you are, and you remember what I should like, and try, Bill, if you give up the water yourself, to see that he is with a man as doesn't drink. Most of the things we hears of—of barges being run down, and of men falling overboard on a dark night—are just drink, and nothing else. You are not a man as drinks yourself; you take your glass when the barge is in the creek, but I have never seen you the worse for liquor since you courted me fifteen years ago, and I tell you there is not a night when you are out on the barge as I don't thank God that it is so. I says to myself, when the wind is blowing on a dark night, 'He is anchored somewheres under a weather shore, and he is snug asleep in his cabin. There is no fear of his driving along through it and carrying on sail; there is no fear of his stumbling as he goes forward and pitching over'; and no one but myself knows what a comfort it is to me. You bring him up in the same way, Bill. You teach him as it is always a good thing to keep from liquor, though a pint with an old mate aint neither here nor there, but that he might almost as well take poison as to drink down in the cabin."
"I will mind, missis; I like the child, and have got it in my mind to bring him up straight, so let us have no more words about it."