"Your honour's pardon," said he, lifting his forearm and drawing the back of it across his dripping brow, "but the grey mare for'rad won't pull, and the whip here won't reach her. I couldn't think upon no better way."
"You mean to tell me you have been pelting that poor brute all down the lane?"
"I couldn't think upon no better way," the seaman repeated wistfully, almost plaintively. "She's what you might call sensitive to stones."
"Intelligent beast!" commented Mr. Fett. "And I bought that mare only six months ago!" (In truth my father had found the poor creature wandering the roads and starving, cast off by her owner as past work, and had purchased her out of mere humanity for thirty shillings.)
"But what business have you to be driving my cart and horses?" he demanded. "And what's the meaning of these stones you're carting?"
"Ballast, your honour."
"Ballast?"
"I don't know how much of it'll ever arrive at this rate," confessed the seaman, dropping the handful of flints and scratching his head. "Tis buying speed at a terrible cost of jettison. But Cap'n Pomery's last order to me was to make haste about it, if we're to catch to-morrow's tide."
"Captain Pomery sent you for these stones?"
"Why, Lord love your honour, a vessel can't discharge two dozen Papist monks and cattle and implements to correspond without wantin' something in their place. Nice flat stones, too, the larger-sized be, and not liable to shift in a sea-way."