"I swan! I'm sorry, Prue. I oughter fire a gun, I allow, before speakin' the ship."
"Fire a gun!" repeated the old woman, panting as she scrambled for the potatoes. "That's what I object to, Ira. You want to speak this ship 'fore you shoot that awful noise. I never can get used to it."
"There, there!" he said, trying to poke the more distant potatoes toward her with his cane. He could not himself stoop; or, if he did, he could only sit erect again after the method of a ratchet wheel. "I won't do so again, Prudence. I be an onthoughtful critter, if ever there was one."
Prudence had recovered the last potato. She stopped to pat his ruddy cheek, nor was it much wrinkled, before she returned to peeling the potatoes.
"I know you don't mean to, Iry," she crooned. Married couples like the Balls, where the man has been at home only for brief visits between voyages, if they really love each other, never grow weary of the little frills on connubial bliss usually worn shabby by other people before the honeymoon is past. "I know you don't mean to. But when you sneeze I think it's the crack o' doom."
"I'm sorry about them potatoes," repeated Cap'n Ira. "I make you a lot of extry work, Prue. Sometimes I feel, fixed as I be in health, I oughter be in the Sailors' Snug Harbor over to Paulmouth. I do, for a fact."
"And what would become of me?" cried the old woman, appalled.
"Well," returned Cap'n Ira, "you couldn't be no worse off than you be. We'd miss each other a heap, I know."
"Ira!" cried his wife. "Ira, I'd just die without you now that I've got you to myself at last. Those long years you were away so much, and us not being blessed with children—"
Ira Ball made a sudden clucking sound with his tongue. That was a sore topic of conversation, and he always tried to dodge it.