He used to wind up his lamentations with "that confounded tub of a ship from Rostock," alluding to the Rostock trader, with which he had been in collision at Bolderaa.
It was his firm belief that if he, Randulf, had been at home, they should never have trapped Jacob Worse.
At seven o'clock they turned back to Randulf's little house, in high spirits, and ravenously hungry.
When they had again eaten—and Worse had not had such an appetite for many a day—they took their steaming tumblers of toddy to the open window, and the blue smoke of their pipes came puffing out like cannon shots, first from the one and then from the other, like two frigates saluting.
After they had smoked on awhile in silence, Worse said: "The sea can be very fine on such a summer evening. Your health."
"The sea is always fine, Jacob. Your health."
"Well, as long as one is young."
"Young! why, you are not more than three years my senior; and that Thomas Randulf has no idea of sneaking to the shore for the next ten years, you may be certain."
"It is otherwise with me. There is something wrong in my inside, you must know."
"Oh, nonsense!" said Randulf. "I don't know much about liver and lungs, and all the trash they say we have in our insides, but what I do know is, that a seafaring man is never well on shore, just as a landsman is as sick as a cat when he comes on board. That is a fact, and it is not to be gainsaid."