“I tell my daughter-in-law they'll keep the moths away,” the old gentleman said, sheepishly.
“I use camphor,” said Miss North. “Flora must bring a dust-pan.”
“Flora?” Alfred Price said. “Now, what's my association with that name?”
“She was our old cook,” Mrs. North explained; “this Flora is her daughter. But you never saw old Flora?”
“Why, yes, I did,” the old man said, slowly. “Yes. I remember Flora. Well, good-by,—Mrs. North.”
“Good-by, Alfred. Come again,” she said, cheerfully.
“Mother, here's your beef tea,” said a brief voice.
Alfred Price fled. He met his son just as he was entering his own house, and burst into a confidence: “Cy, my boy, come aft and splice the main-brace. Cyrus, what a female! She knocked me higher than Gilroy's kite. And her mother was as sweet a girl as you ever saw!” He drew his son into a little, low-browed, dingy room at the end of the hall. Its grimy untidiness matched the old Captain's clothes, but it was his one spot of refuge in his own house; here he could scatter his tobacco ashes almost unrebuked, and play on his harmonicon without seeing Gussie wince and draw in her breath; for Mrs. Cyrus rarely entered the “cabin.” “I worry so about its disorderliness that I won't go in,” she used to say, in a resigned way. And the Captain accepted her decision with resignation of his own. “Crafts of your bottom can't navigate in these waters,” he agreed, earnestly; and, indeed, the room was so cluttered with his belongings that voluminous hoop-skirts could not get steerageway. “He has so much rubbish,” Gussie complained; but it was precious rubbish to the old man. His chest was behind the door; a blowfish, stuffed and varnished, hung from the ceiling; two colored prints of the “Barque Letty M., 800 tons,” decorated the walls; his sextant, polished daily by his big, clumsy hands, hung over the mantelpiece, on which were many dusty treasures—the mahogany spoke of an old steering-wheel; a whale's tooth; two Chinese wrestlers, in ivory; a fan of spreading white coral; a conch-shell, its beautiful red lip serving to hold a loose bunch of cigars. In the chimney-breast was a little door, and the Captain, pulling his son into the room after that call on Mrs. North, fumbled in his pockets for the key. “Here,” he said; (“as the Governor of North Carolina said to the Governor of South Carolina)—Cyrus, she gave her mother beef tea!”
But Cyrus was to receive still further enlightenment on the subject of his opposite neighbor:
“She called him in. I heard her, with my own ears! 'Alfred,' she said, 'come in.' Cyrus, she has designs; oh, I worry so about it! He ought to be protected. He is very old, and, of course, foolish. You ought to check it at once.”