"So do I," said Jack.
"He's my only boy, captain," said Mrs. Harding. "I couldn't part with him."
"I don't blame you, ma'am, not a particle; though there's the making of a sailor in Jack."
"If he went away, he'd never come back," said Rachel, lugubriously.
"I don't know about that, ma'am. I've been a sailor, man and boy, forty years, and here I am, well and hearty to-day."
"The captain is about your age, isn't he, Aunt Rachel?" said Jack, maliciously.
"I'm only thirty-nine," said Rachel, sharply.
"Then I must have been under a mistake all my life," said the cooper to himself. "Rachel's forty-seven, if she's a day."
This remark he prudently kept to himself, or a fit of hysterics would probably have been the result.
"I wouldn't have taken you for a day over thirty-five, ma'am," said the captain, gallantly.