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“Marry in haste and repent at leisure,” is a time-honored idea, and calls to mind a matrimonial circumstance which, according to pretty lively authority, once came about in the glorious Empire State. A certain Captain of a Lake Erie steamer, who was blessed with an elegant temperament for fun, fashion, and the feminines, was “laid up,” over winter, near his childhood’s home in Genesee county. Having nearly exhausted his private stock of jokes, and gone the entire rounds of life and liveliness of the season, he bethought him how he should create a little stir, and have his joke at the expense of a young Doctor, who had recently “located” in the neighborhood, and by his rather taking person and manners, cut something of a swath in the community, and especially amongst the calico!

The profession of young Esculapius gave him an access to private society that ordinary circumstances did not vouch to most men. Among the many families with which Dr. Mutandis had formed an acquaintance was that of old Capt. Figgles. The Captain was a queer old mortal, who in his hale old days had quit life on the ocean wave for the quietude of agricultural comfort. The Captain was a blustering salt, whimsical, but generous and social, as old sailors most generally are. He was supposed to be in easy circumstances, but how easy, very few knew.

Capt. Figgles’s family consisted of himself, three daughters, one married and “settled,” the other two at home; an ancient colored woman, who had served in the Captain’s family,–ship and shore–a lifetime. Dinah and old Sam, her husband, with two or three farm-laborers, constituted the Captain’s household. Betsy, the youngest daughter, the old man’s favorite, had been christened Elizabeth, but that not being warm enough for Capt. Figgles’s idea of attachment, he ever called his daughter, Betsy, and so she was called by almost everybody at all familiar with the family. Betsy Figgles was not a very poetical subject, by name or size. She was a fine, bouncing young woman of four-and-twenty; she was dutiful and bountiful, if not beautiful. She was useful, and even ornamental in her old father’s eyes, and, as he was wont to say, in his never-to-be-forgotten salt-water linguae —

“Betsy was a craft, she was; a square-bilt, trim, well-ballasted craft, fore and aft; none of your sky-scraping, taut, Baltimore clipper, fair-weather, no-tonnage jigamarees! Betsy is a woman; her mother was just like her when I fell in with her, and it wasn’t long afore I chartered her for a life’s voyage. And the man who lets such a woman slip her cable and stand off soundings, for ‘Cowes and a market,’ when he’s got a chance to fill out her papers and take command, is not a man, but a mouse, or a long-tailed Jamaica rat!”

Between Capt. Tiller, our Lake boatman, and Capt. Figgles, there was an intimacy of some years’ standing, but the old Captain and the young Captain didn’t exactly “hitch horses”–whether it was because Capt. T. came under the old man’s idea of “a Jamaica rat,” or because he looked upon inland sailors as greenhorns, deponent saith not.

Dr. Mutandis and Capt. Figgles were only upon so-so sort of business sociality, though both the junior Captain and the Doctor were intimate enough with both the Miss Figgleses. Capt. Tiller, as we intimated, was about to leave for coming duties on the Lake, and being so full of old Nick, it was indispensable that he must play off a practical joke, or have some fun with somebody, as a sort of a yarn for the season, on his boat.

The Figgleses announced a grand quilting scrape; the Doctor and Captain were among the invited guests, of course, and for some hours the assembled party had indeed as grand a good time generally as usually falls to the lot of a country community. Old black Ebenezer–but whose name had also been cut down for convenience sake to Sam, by the old Captain–did the orchestral duties upon his fiddle, which, aided by a youngster on the triangle and another on the tambourine, formed quite “a full band” for the occasion, and dancing was done up in style!