“Yes,” said Mrs. Dodd, “and of bludgeons and things, rather than the polished rapier. What expressions to fall from two highly educated gentlemen! Slope—Potato-trap—Sawbones—Catlap—je n'en finirais pas.”
She then let them know that she meditated a “dictionary of jargon;” in hopes that its bulk might strike terror into honest citizens, and excite an anti-jargon league to save the English language, now on the verge of dissolution.
Sampson was pleased with this threat. “Now, that is odd,” said he. “Why, I am compilin' a vocabulary myself. I call 't th' ass-ass-ins' dickshinary; showing how, by the use of mealy-mouthed and d'exotic phrases, knaves can lead fools by th' ear a vilent dith. F'r instance; if one was to say to John Bull, 'Now I'll cut a great gash in your arm and let your blood run till ye drop down senseless,' he'd take fright and say, 'Call another time!' So the profissional ass-ass-in words it thus: 'I'll bleed you from a large orifice till the occurrence of syncope.' All right sis John: he's bled from a lar j'orifice and dies three days after of th' assassin's knife hid in a sheath o' goose grease. But I'll bloe the gaff with my dictionary.”
“Meantime there is another contribution to mine,” said Mrs. Dodd.
And they agreed in the gaiety of their hearts to compare their rival Lexicons.
CHAPTER XIII
THE subsiding sea was now a liquid Paradise: its great pellucid braes and hillocks shone with the sparkle and the hues of all the jewels in an emperor's crown. Imagine—after three days of inky sea, and pitchy sky, and Death's deep jaws snapping and barely missing—ten thousand great slopes of emerald, aquamarine, amethyst and topaz, liquid, alive, and dancing jocundly beneath a gorgeous sun: and you will have a faint idea of what met the eyes and hearts of the rescued looking out of that battered, jagged ship, upon ocean smiling back to smiling Heaven.
Yet one man felt no buoyancy, nor gush of joy. He leaned against a fragment of the broken bulwark, confused between the sweetness of life preserved and the bitterness of treasure lost—his wife's and children's treasured treasure; benumbed at heart, and almost weary of the existence he had battled for so stoutly. He looked so moody, and answered so grimly and unlike himself, that they all held aloof from him; heavy heart among so many joyful ones, he was in true solitude; the body in a crowd, the soul alone. And he was sore as well as heavy; for of all the lubberly acts he had ever known, the way he had lost his dear ones' fortune seemed to him the worst.
A voice sounded in his ear: “Poor thing! she has s foundered.”