"We thought you were a very old gentleman," I explained giddily.
"_I am_," said the Bottle Man. "Ancient."
"But what about your gray hairs?" Jerry demanded, tugging away at
the oars.
"If you've more than one gray hair you've gray hairs," said our man.
"I have eleven."
He ducked down his nice, dark, rumpled-up head for us to look, but I
must say I couldn't see more than one little one all buried among
the black.
"You're grown up, but you're not old at all," I said. "We've been
imagining you as an aged old man with a long white beard."
"I never mentioned a long white beard," the Bottle Man said.
"Yes; but what about your tottering along on two sticks?" Jerry said
suddenly.
But we had come alongside the catboat, and no one could talk for a
little while until we were all arranged in the boat and our man had
told Jerry and me to pull a mattressy thing out of the tiny little
cabin and had laid Greg on it in the bottom of the boat. He gave him
some stuff out of a little flasky bottle, too, and Greg sputtered
over it and said "Ugh!" but afterward he said:
"It's nice and hot inside when I thought it had gone."
And we couldn't talk, either, when our man was hoisting the
orange-painted sail and hauling up the anchor and running back and
forth to pull ropes and things. But when he was settled at the
tiller and all of us were cosy with sweaters and coats, Jerry asked
him again.
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