"Here 's one 't ain't worth but two cents," said one fair creature, holding up a specimen of my stock, whose appearance beside her own fresh beauty caused me to writhe for shame. "I shan't give a mite more for her."
"O madam, is she worth that?" I denied impulsively.
The woman, speechless, dropped the cabbage to the earth.
"Here 's a nickel, anyway, for your bein' so honest," she exclaimed, soon afterward.
I took it with a bow. And here sordid considerations ceased, as they had begun: my pious emotions toward the sex conquered, and I became not the base purveyor but the elegant distributor of cabbages, right and left, only with murmured apologies for gifts so unworthy.
I was now evidently classified as belonging high in the spectacular drama; when the horse, having finished the meal of cracked corn he had been enjoying by the roadside, with the reins thrown slack over his neck, suddenly lifted his head with an air of arriving at some instant conclusion and started merrily down the road.
Too lame to jump from a moving vehicle, my first emotions of dismay gradually disappeared, however, as I found that our passage was not disturbed even by the most untoward outward events. For a base-ball from the bat of some players in an adjoining field hit the noble animal full in the flank without occasioning any alarm to his gait or divergence from his resolved purpose.
He turned down the Artichoke road and went straight to Uncle Coffin's. "I've come to take you and Aunt Salomy to the show," I said, lifted out and knocked hither and thither by my friend in his tender ecstasy.
"Cruisin' out on the high seas without no rudder, you—you young spark, you!" he cried delightedly. "You're 'most too full o' the devil t' exist!" he exclaimed at last, holding me out at arm's-length admiringly.
Proud now of my wickedness as I had formerly been of my charms, I steered my friends to the Point by the conventional means of the rudder. Captain Pharo, who had been so congenially occupied that he had not even missed me, heaped encomiums upon me, and receiving Uncle Coffin almost with tears of joy in his eyes, led him away to the tin shop.