With like comments he ran down the line till he came to the last man, in front of whom he stepp’d back.
“About this last—he’s a puzzler. Times I put him top o’ the list, an’ times at the tail. That’s Ned Masters, an’ was once the Reverend Edward Masters, Bachelor o’ Divinity in Cambridge College; but in a tavern there fell a-talking with a certain Pelagian about Adam an’ Eve, an’ because the fellow turn’d stubborn, put a knife into his waistband, an’ had to run away to sea: a middling drinker only, but after a quart or so to hear him tackle Predestination! So there be times after all when I sets’n apart, and says, ‘Drunk, you’m no good, but half-drunk, you’m priceless.’ Now there’s a man—” He dropp’d his mop, and, leading us aft, pointed with admiring finger to the helmsman—a thin, wizen’d fellow, with a face like a crab apple, and a pair of piercing grey eyes half hidden by the droop of his wrinkled lids. “Gabriel Hutchins, how old be you?”
“Sixty-four, come next Martinmas,” pip’d the helmsman.
“In what state o’ life?”
“Drunk.”
“How drunk?”
“As a lord!”
“Canst stand upright?”
“Hee-hee! Now could I iver do other?—a miserable ould worms to whom the sweet effects o’ quantums be denied. When was I iver wholesomely maz’d? Or when did I lay my grey hairs on the floor, saying, ’Tis enough, an’ ’tis good’? Answer me that, Cap’n Bill.”
“But you hopes for the best, Gabriel.”