“Eh, Saunders, where are ye gawin?” and many other taunting expressions to the disparagement of my country, which will hardly bear the press, were flung at me from the English portion of the circle now assembled to hear this confusion of tongues. If the Scotch, in its purity, be bad enough, it is truly savage in the mouth of a pretender; and I was doubly provoked to hear its Doric beauties marred by southern lips. I made play, therefore, for some time, but presently became quite angry, which was exactly what the rogues desired. Then, suddenly seized with a bright thought, I turned short round on the original framer of the mischief, whose interpretation of my native word ‘tint’ had brought the laugh upon me, and said, in a rage, “I dare say it was you that stole the half-guinea!”
For one moment, and no more, I had the laugh with me; but, in the next instant, a shower of thumps from the accused party vindicated the freedom of cock-pit justice, and set the whole posse of us small fry to the right and left, like a shoal of flying fish sprung upon by a dolphin.
This affair had scarcely blown by, when I got into a second scrape, also with a countryman, who was then, and still is, one of the best friends I have, but whose fate it was, at that early period, to inspire me with many doubts as to the value of his good offices, albeit they were every way kind and disinterested.
There is no class of persons in His Majesty’s naval service who have such ravenous appetites as the younger class of middies—indeed their plates and platters leave the birth, generally, as clean as they were before the dinner entered. What may be the cause of this voracity it is needless to inquire—the fact of their prodigious appetites is universal. And it will easily be imagined that, in such a community, the Esquimaux maxim of first come, first served, would sometimes introduce itself into the practice of those polished young gentlemen. One day, after keeping the forenoon watch, I went down at half-past twelve to dinner, but found nothing left on the board but a morsel of the ship’s beef which we generally called salt junk, and sometimes believed to be salt horse, resembling very much a piece of mahogany, and often quite as sapless. To this was added a very small portion of suet pudding, called in our lingo, dough, or duff, and differing but little in aspect and weight from good honest pipe-clay. It has been very properly observed of a young midshipman, that, ‘although God may turn his heart, the devil cannot turn his stomach;’ and certainly, upon this occasion, I made no sort of objection to the victuals set before me—except as to the quantity. In five minutes, the dish and the plate had returned to that habitual state of purity, which would have rendered the office of scullion a complete sinecure, had we been honoured with such an attendant.
While I was ruminating upon this meagre fare, one of the oldsters bawled out to me, “Come, youngster, you have done your dinner—march off! I want your place at the table to write my log up—so scull away with you!” And, in spite of Lord Chesterfield, which he was constantly reading, he instantly shovelled me right into the cock-pit. What with the indignity of my exit, which I cannot more particularly describe, without a greater breach of the graces than I choose to risk even at this long interval of time, and what with the empty state of my stomach, I mounted upon deck again, of course, in a precious bad humour, not a quarter of an hour from the time I had dived.
“Hollo! Maister Saunders,” cried one of my Scotch friends, “what’s the matter with you? You look as black as your countryman when he was caught half-way through a hole in the orchard wall.”
“Why,” said I, glad to find some vent for my disappointment, “to tell you the truth, I have not got my share of the pudding to-day.”
“Oh! ho! that’s it—is it? Capital! Your share of the pudding?—excellent!” And away he shot down the ladder, to pass the joke amongst the rest below; so that, by and by, I was assailed at every turn with inquiries touching my ‘share of the pudding;’ and my unfortunate speech, translated into various dialects of what they all thought Scotch, merely because it was not like English, was sung out like a ballad, for the amusement of the whole fraternity, for the next week.
This, like the half-guinea story, would soon have passed off for something else, had not one of the mess been reading Sir Launcelot Greaves, in which book one Justice Gobble is described as a great glutton. The malicious young reader no sooner came to the place than he roared out that he had found a name for me! and I was dubbed forthwith Mr. Justice Gobble, which title I retained till another, somewhat more to my taste, and more appropriate, I hoped, was given in exchange.
I had heard or read somewhere, that if a bottle, well corked, were let down into the sea for a hundred fathoms or so, and then drawn up again, it would be found full of fresh water. Like most modern discoverers, I took upon me to suppose that this experiment had not been properly tried before. So, one fine, calm morning, I borrowed a couple of cod lines, which were then in grand preparation for the banks of Newfoundland, and having stowed myself out of sight, under the breast of one of the lower deck guns, I plunged my apparatus overboard. Some one detected me when I was just beginning to haul in the apparatus; and, before it reached the surface, half-a-dozen of my less scientific messmates were perched on the neighbouring guns and chests, cracking their jokes upon my proceedings. A huge horse-laugh was got ready to explode upon me as I examined the bottle, and found the cork in its place, but inverted, and the contents as salt as need be.