“Well,” said I, after we had pretty nigh wrung each other’s hands off in friendly greeting, “and how are you all getting on aboard the dear old barquey? I want to hear about everybody.”
“Begorrah, Dick, give me toime to recover me bre’th, me bhoy, an’ thin I’ll till ye ivverythin’,” and then he continued in a bashful sort of way, unlike his usual off-hand manner, “I’ve lift the say for good, an’ sit up for a docther ashore on me own hook, faith.”
“Why!” I exclaimed in great surprise, “how’s that?”
“Bedad, you’d betther axe y’r sister.”
“What! my sister Janet?”
“Faith, yis; the very same little darlint of a colleen. Dick, ye spalpeen, jist lit me shake y’r fist agin, lad. I’m the happiest man in the wurrld!”
“Whee-e-e-e-eew,” I whistled through my teeth. “This is indeed a surprise!”
Then it all came out, Garry telling a long yarn about his calling at my mother’s house to ask about me some few months back, and meeting there Elsie, whom he had no difficulty in identifying, he said, as “the little girl of the ghost-ship,” though she had grown a bit taller and was more good-looking than he remembered her at the time he saw her on board the Saint Pierre. But, good-looking as she was, he did not think her to be compared to my sister Janet, with whom he had evidently fallen in love at first sight and very deeply so, too!
On his subsequently declaring his passion, impetuous as usual, after a very short acquaintance, my mother insisted as a first step to entertaining his suit that he should leave the sea, as he had another profession by which he was quite capable of supporting a wife as well as himself, if he so pleased.
“Faith, and I wint an’ bought a practis’ at onst, havin’ a snig little sum stowed away in the bank,” continued Garry, “the savin’s of me pay for the last five year an’ more, besides that money we all got for salvagin’ the French ship, sure, of which I nivver spint a ha’poth. But aven thin, Dick, ould chap, yer dear ould mother wern’t satisfied, bless her ould heart. She sid that yer sisther an’ mesilf wu’ld have to wait to git marri’d till you came home, ye spalpeen; an’ not thin aven, if so be as how ye’d turn nasty an’ disagreyable, an’ refuse yer consint. Faith, ye won’t now, will ye? or, bedad, I’ll be afther breakin’ ivvrey bone in y’r body, avic, an’ thin have to plasther ye up ag’in.”