Arthur complied, and Basset led him to the little cabin which the three young officers occupied together.
“Behold!” said Basset grandiloquently, with a flourish of his hand towards the berths. “Behold, I beseech you, him that hath alone routed the Spaniard, swept the seas, saved England, and covered him with glory! He it is whose name shall live in the chronicles of the time! He shall have a statue—of gingerbread—in the court of Her Majesty’s Palace of Westminster, and his name shall be set up—wrought in white goose feathers—on the forefront of Paul’s! Hail to the valiant and unconquerable Jack Enville, the deliverer of England from Pope and Spaniard!”
To the great astonishment of Arthur, there lay the valiant Jack, rolled in a blanket, apparently very much at his ease: but when Basset’s peroration was drawing to a close, he unrolled himself, looking rather red in the face, and returned to ordinary life by standing on the floor in full uniform.
“Hold thy blatant tongue for an ass as thou art!” was his civil reply to Basset’s lyric on his valour. “If I did meet a wound in the first flush of the fray, and came down hither to tend the same, what blame lieth therein?”
“Wert thou wounded, Jack?” asked Arthur.
“Too modest belike to show it,” observed Basset. “Where is it, trow? Is thy boot-toe abrased, or hast had five hairs o’ thine head carried away?”
“’Tis in my left wrist,” said Jack, replying to Arthur, not Basset.
“Prithee, allow us to feast our eyes on so glorious a sign of thy valiantness!” said Basset.
Jack was extremely reluctant to show his boasted wound; but being pressed to do so by both his friends (from different motives) he exhibited something which looked like a severe scratch from a cat.
“Why, ’tis not much!” said Arthur, who could have shown several worse indications of battle on himself, which he had not thought worth notice.