Elizabeth Ann, before she went to bed was as completely tangled up about time as a girl could well be. It seemed, for Uncle Hiram told her so while Aunt Grace was giving Doris a hot bath and putting her to bed—rather into her bunk—that on board a ship the half hours are very important. The ship’s clock strikes for them all. And Uncle Hiram showed Elizabeth Ann, using his beautiful mahogany clock which was in what he called “the first cabin” (and that was the parlor) how the time was told off, starting at midnight.
“One bell is half-past twelve,” explained Uncle Hiram. “Two bells is one o’clock; three bells is half-past one, and so on, around the clock. It’s easy enough to understand, once you’re used to it, but your Aunt Grace never would bother to learn it. She says she went by land time so long that she can’t learn any new way of telling time.”
“I don’t think it is easy,” Elizabeth Ann said honestly, “and it does mix me up. But I am going to learn it. Ted and Lansing know lots of things I don’t, and I am going to learn something to surprise them.”
“Don’t try to learn it all at once,” advised Uncle Hiram kindly. “Take things easy—you’ll have all winter to learn ship’s time in, and I will help you. There’s your Aunt Grace calling you now.”
Aunt Grace wanted Elizabeth Ann to take her bath, and after peeping into the kitchen and seeing that Tony was asleep on a small round rug quite as though he felt at home there, Elizabeth Ann climbed the ladder up to the pretty blue and white bathroom and had her bath. Three minutes after that she was fast asleep, for no matter how exciting it might be to sleep in a bunk, no little girl who had traveled more than two hundred miles in one day could hope to keep awake very long after she had gotten into such a nice soft bed.
It was fortunate that the next day there was no school—perhaps Uncle Hiram had arranged things purposely so that Elizabeth Ann and Doris should reach the farm one day before school opened. He must have known that there would be many things they wanted to see. The farm belonged to Aunt Grace and she had lived on it all her life, she told the two little girls, who insisted on drying the dishes for her the next morning.
“Your Uncle Hiram,” said Aunt Grace, and while of course he was Doris’s uncle Elizabeth Ann felt as though he might be her uncle “a little bit” as she said, for Doris was her cousin. “Your Uncle Hiram was on a sailing vessel for forty years. It’s no wonder he can’t bear to get away from the sea. But when he retired, he came back to Gardner, where he lived when he was a boy, and we planned to be married. I’m twenty years younger than he is and I didn’t want to give up this farm—in fact I’d promised my mother and father to always live here. Your uncle would have liked to live nearer the ocean, I think, but he was very nice about it. He had some money saved and he said he’d build us a house to live in, if I would let him build the kind of house he liked. So he built this ship and I had the tenant farmer move in the old farm house and we’ve been right happy. Plenty of people think we’re crazy to live in a place that is part ship and part house, but there are some things I like about it.”
“I think it is lovely,” declared Elizabeth Ann loyally. “I like to go up and down ladders; and I like to sleep in a bunk.”
“Well, I like the deck, myself,” Aunt Grace explained. “It’s the best place to dry clothes you ever did see. And in summer we have a awning stretched over part of it and have chairs out there and it is fine—there’s always a breeze. Some folks call it the roof, of course, but your Uncle Hiram likes me to say ‘deck’ and I always do.”
And after the dishes were dried and put away, Aunt Grace took Elizabeth Ann and Doris up to see the deck. It was scrubbed to a shining whiteness, and there was a railing all around, just as there would be on a ship, so that no one could fall off. They could see far over the fields, and Aunt Grace pointed out the farm house where the tenant farmer lived and even the chimneys of the house on the next farm.