“Two, four, six, eight, ten—elev-en!” counted she at the end, picking up the napkin-rings; “I don’t seem to see that twelfth ring!” and she looked hard at the unfortunate that had acquired her dislike in the first of the interview by an unfeeling allusion to money.
“Here it is, Aunty,” remarked the señor. “I wanted to hear you ask after it.”
“Now, look at here, Sammy, you’re too old for such tricks,” [♦]expostulated the dame, in precisely the tone one admonishes a child; and then turning to the company generally she added confidentially:
[♦] ‘exposulated’ replaced with ‘expostulated’
“I ain’t one of them that’s given to suspicion, and it ain’t a Nantucket failing; but last summer there was a boy, one of those half-grown critters, you know, neither beef nor veal, and I just saw him pocket—well, it was that very knife-handle. I always kept an eye on it since, thinking it might be off yet. So I waited till I saw he actooally meant it, and was fixing to go off with it, and then says I:
“‘Well, sonny, going to unload before you start out on a new v’yge?’ So that’s all about the carvings; and these are shark’s teeth,—none of your Wauwinet sand-sharks that would run away from a puppy-dog no bigger than that, but a reg’lar man-eater off the West Indies; and these very teeth took a man’s leg off.”
“Horrible!” cried one, while another, one of the persistent souls who must finish A before they begin B, inquired: “But did the boy give up the knife-handle?”
“Why, of course he did, my dear, since that’s it,” replied the hostess compassionately; and then, with the inborn courtesy peculiar to Nantucket folk, turned aside the laugh that followed by hastily displaying some new marvel. The room was crowded with marine curiosities, many of them brought home by the deceased captain, many of them presented to his relict by his comrades or by her own friends; they were mostly such as we have seen many times in many places, but some few were sui generis, such as a marriage contract between a Quaker bachelor and maid in the early days of the island, with the signatures of half the settlers appended as witnesses, mutual consent before others being the only ceremony required by the canon of these Non-sacramentarians. Then there was Phœbe Ann’s comb, a wonderful work of art in tortoise shell, anent which the possessor, Phœbe Ann’s sister, delivered a short original poem, setting forth how ardently Phœbe Ann had desired one of these immense combs, their price being eight dollars each; and how, having engaged it, she set to work to earn it by picking berries for sale; but before the pence had grown to the pounds the big comb was out of fashion, and poor Phœbe Ann’s hair, which had been wonderfully luxuriant, fell off through illness, and what remained was cut short. Nantucket probity would not, however, be off its bargain for such cause as this; and Phœbe Ann paid her money and took her ornamental comb,—more useful in its present connection, perhaps, than it could have been in any other. The crown and glory of Mrs. McCleve’s museum, however, is a carved wooden vase, twelve or fourteen inches in height, made from the top of one of the red-cedar posts planted a century or two since by this lady’s ancestor, to inclose a certain parcel of land belonging to him. Twenty or thirty years ago the fence was to be renewed, and one of her cousins proposed to her to drive out to the place and secure a relic of the original island cedar now extinct. She accepted; and the section of the post, sawed off with great exertion by the cousin, was turned and carved into its present shape in “Cousin Reuben Macy’s shop on Orange Street.”
But all this set forth in an original poem delivered with much unction by its author, who decisively refuses a copy to any and everybody, and is even chary of letting any one listen to it more than once. It is original—in fact, one may say, intensely original—and quite as well worth listening to as the saga of a royal skald. It begins after this fashion:
“This vase, of which we have in contemplation,