“O Captain Sands!” said I, there being a convenient pause, “you were speaking of your wife just now; did you ask her if she saw the shower?”

“First thing she spoke of when I got into the house.  ‘There,’ says she, ’I was afraid you wouldn’t see the rain coming in time, and I had my heart in my mouth when it began to thunder.  I thought you’d get soaked through, and be laid up for a fortnight,’ says she.  ’I guess a summer shower won’t hurt an old sailor like me,’ says I.”  And the captain reached for another piece of his kelp-stalk, and whittled away more busily than ever.  Kate took out her knife and also began to cut kelp, and I threw pebbles in the hope of hitting a spider which sat complacently on a stone not far away, and when he suddenly vanished there was nothing for me to do but to whittle kelp also.

“Do you suppose,” said Kate, “that Mrs. Sands really made you know about that shower?”

The captain put on his most serious look, coughed slowly, and moved himself a few inches nearer us, along the boat.  I think he fully understood the importance and solemnity of the subject.  “It ain’t for us to say what we do know or don’t, for there’s nothing sartain, but I made up my mind long ago that there’s something about these p’ints that’s myster’ous.  My wife and me will be sitting there to home and there won’t be no word between us for an hour, and then of a sudden we’ll speak up about the same thing.  Now the way I view it, she either puts it into my head or I into hers.  I’ve spoke up lots of times about something, when I didn’t know what I was going to say when I began, and she’ll say she was just thinking of that.  Like as not you have noticed it sometimes?  There was something my mind was dwellin’ on yesterday, and she come right out with it, and I’d a good deal rather she hadn’t,” said the captain, ruefully.  “I didn’t want to rake it all over ag’in, I’m sure.”  And then he recollected himself, and was silent, which his audience must confess to have regretted for a moment.

“I used to think a good deal about such things when I was younger, and I’m free to say I took more stock in dreams and such like than I do now.  I rec’lect old Parson Lorimer—­this Parson Lorimer’s father who was settled here first—­spoke to me once about it, and said it was a tempting of Providence, and that we hadn’t no right to pry into secrets.  I know I had a dream-book then that I picked up in a shop in Bristol once when I was there on the Ranger, and all the young folks were beset to get sight of it.  I see what fools it made of folks, bothering their heads about such things, and I pretty much let them go:  all this stuff about spirit-rappings is enough to make a man crazy.  You don’t get no good by it.  I come across a paper once with a lot of letters in it from sperits, and I cast my eye over ’em, and I says to myself, ’Well, I always was given to understand that when we come to a futur’ state we was goin’ to have more wisdom than we can