“Idle time, you would say; yes, yes; it has been his misfortune to be out of work a good deal latterly and wickedness has got into his head, for want of something better to think of.  Too much”—­

“Wife,” interrupted the old man, emphatically.  Another general, and far less equivocal laugh, at the expense of Desire, succeeded this blunt declaration Nothing intimidated by such a manifest assent to the opinion of the hardy seaman, the undaunted virago resumed,—­

“Ah! you little know the suffering and forbearance I have endured with the man in so many long years.  Had the fellow you met the look of one who had left an injured woman behind him?”

“I can’t say there was any thing about him which said, in so many words, that the woman he had left at her moorings was more or less injured;” returned the tar, with commendable discrimination, “but there was enough about him to show, that, however and wherever he may have stowed his wife, if wife she was, he had not seen fit to leave all her outfit at home.  The man had plenty of female toggery around his neck; I suppose he found it more agreeable than her arms.”

“What!” exclaimed Desire, looking aghast; “has he dared to rob me!  What had he of mine? not the gold beads!”

“I’ll not swear they were no sham.”

“The villain!” continued the enraged termagant, catching her breath like a person that had just been submerged in water longer than is agreeable to human nature, and forcing her way through the crowd, with such vigour as soon to be in a situation to fly to her secret hordes, in order to ascertain the extent of her misfortune; “the sacrilegious villain! to rob the wife of his bosom, the mother of his own children, and”—­

“Well, well,” again interrupted the landlord of the ‘Foul Anchor,’ with his unseasonable voice, “I never before heard the good-man suspected of roguery, though the neighbourhood was ever backward in calling him chicken-hearted.”

The old seaman looked the publican full in the face, with much meaning in his eye, as he answered,—­

“If the honest tailor never robbed any but that virago, there would be no great thieving sin to be laid to his account; for every bead he had about him wouldn’t serve to pay his ferryage.  I could carry all the gold on his neck in my eye, and see none the worse for its company.  But it is a shame to stop the entrance into a licensed tavern, with such a mob, as if it were an embargoed port; and so I nave sent the woman after her valuables, and all the idlers, as you see, in her wake.”

Joe Joram gazed on the speaker like a man enthralled by some mysterious charm; neither answering nor altering the direction of his eye, for near a minute.  Then, suddenly breaking out in a deep and powerful laugh, as if he were not backward in enjoying the artifice, which certainly had produced the effect of removing the crowd from his own door to that of the absent tailor, he flourished his arm in the way of greeting, and exclaimed,—­“Welcome, tarry Bob; welcome, old boy, welcome!  From what cloud have you fallen? and before what wind have you been running, that Newport is again your harbour?”