“D’ye hear?” cried the captain.
“Ye–es.”
“Then look alive.”
The captain followed this up with a roar and such an indescribably ferocious demonstration that the girl fled in terror to the culinary regions, where she found the cat breakfasting on a pat of butter. The girl yelled, and flung first a saucepan, and after that the lid of a teapot, at the thief. She failed, of course, in this effort to commit murder, and the cat vanished.
Breakfast was brought, but, excepting in the captain’s case, breakfast was not eaten. What between questioning, and crying, and hysterical laughing, and replying, and gasping, explaining, misunderstanding, exclaiming, and choking, the other members of the party that breakfasted that morning in the yellow cottage with the much-abused green door, did little else than upset tea-cups and cream-pots, and sputter eggs about, and otherwise make a mess of the once immaculate tablecloth.
“Oh, Aunt Martha!” exclaimed Ailie, in the midst of a short pause in the storm, “I’m so very, very, very glad to be home!”
The child said this with intense fervour. No one but he who has been long, long away from the home of his childhood, and had come back after having despaired of ever seeing it again, can imagine with what deep fervour she said it, and then burst into tears.
Aunt Jane at that moment was venturing to swallow her first mouthful of tea, so she gulped and choked, and Aunt Martha spent the next five minutes in violently beating the poor creature’s back, as if she deemed choking a serious offence which merited severe punishment. As for the captain, that unfeeling monster went on grinning from ear to ear, and eating a heavy breakfast, as if nothing had happened. But a close observer might have noticed a curious process going on at the starboard side of his weather-beaten nose.
In one of his many desperate encounters with whales, Captain Dunning had had the end of a harpoon thrust accidentally into the prominent member of his face just above the bridge. A permanent little hole was the result, and on the morning of which we write, a drop of water got into that hole continually, and when it rolled out—which it did about once every two minutes—and fell into the captain’s tea-cup, it was speedily replaced by another drop, which trickled into the depths of that small cavern on the starboard side of the captain’s nose. We don’t pretend to account for that curious phenomenon. We merely record the fact.
While the breakfast party were yet in this April mood, a knock was heard at the outer door.