Page:Ballinger Price--Us and the Bottle Man.djvu/88

Rh nice sloshy green water with old boxes and straws floating by, and sometimes horrid orange-peels that picnic people throw in.

That afternoon Captain Moss was mending the stern of one of his boats, and when we asked him what he was fitting on, he said: "Rudder-gudgeons."

He grunted it out so funnily that it sounded just like some queer old flounder trying to talk, and we thought he was joking. But he was n't at all. Sometimes he is very nice and tells us the longest yarns about when he shipped on a whaler, but this time he was busy and the rudder-gudgeons did n't behave right, I think, so he let us do all the talking. We told him a good deal about the bottle, and also something about the city under the sea. He said he should n't wonder at it, for there was powerful curious things under the sea. He also said he supposed now we'd be wanting to hire the Jolly Nancy 74