"No; the taller lady."
"Smite my timbers! A regular-built stunner! Wot a wonderful coinsiddins!—wot a cannondrum! as the player chaps say, when they go bouncing about to the fiddles and blue fire!"
"It is destiny, Noah."
"Jest wot they says too! Well, I have given over sweethearting now; but I have shared my pay with many o' that sort o' ware in my time. The best of 'em all—here's her photograff done in gunpowder by the cook's mate of the Haurora, as we were a working out of the harbour of Odessa. Many a mouthful of salt-water I've swallowed, and many a whistling Dick I've heard since that was done," said Noah, pointing to the tattooing visible on his breast when his check shirt was open. "But won't you introdooce me as an old shipmate? 'Mornin' marm, 'mornin'," he added, sweeping the deck with his sou'-wester, as Ethel came frankly forward; "I'm one o' them as took Mr. Ashton off the cliffs, and sailed with him to Rio Janairey, in South 'Meriky, in the old Princess as was."
"Indeed—oh, I am most happy to see you, sir," replied Ethel.
"Call me Noah, marm—Noah Gawthrop; I ain't used to being sir'd," said he, smoothing down his gray hair.
"Well, my good friend Noah," said Ethel, her eyes beaming, as she presented her little white hand to Gawthrop, who looked at his own hard palm, rubbed it well on his trousers as if to clean it, and then shook hers gently and kindly, not crushing it up as the tars do invariably in the play.
"Such a dear old thing it is!" said Rose, laughing, as she observed this interview.
"I've made a man of him for you, Miss Ethel—I knows your name, you see; one couldn't be long with Mr. Ashton, keeping watch and watch, without finding out that—but I have made a man of him for you, marm. He wasn't worth a tobacco-stopper at first; but I've taught him to becket a royal, and send it down, yard and all, in a stiff topgallant breeze, or a regular squall; to slush a mast from the truck-head downward; to haul out to leeward when on the yard-arm, and if that ain't summut towards making him a good husband for you, and one as will, through the voyage of life, keep a firm hand on your rudder, and trim you nicely by the starn, I don't know wot is."
Noah's praises and rough congratulations were unintelligible to Ethel; but as they were calculated to excite laughter, and as some of his adjectives applicable to the "shark up aloft in the fore-cross-trees" were neither elegant nor euphonious, he was speedily sent forward by Tom Bartelot.