"I ask no more: then he may go about the house like a tame rabbit. When will your ship be ready, boy?"
"In about a fortnight, sir. I called upon Captain Oughton the day before yesterday, but he was not at home. His steward gave me the information."
"What is the name of the ship?"
"The Windsor Castle, sir."
"Why, all the India ships appear to be called Castles. Your last ship was the Bombay Castle, I think?"
"Yes, sir: there are a great many of them so named—they really are floating castles."
"And full of ladies. You 'castle your queens,' as they do at chess. Humph!"
A pun from Mr John Forster was a rarity: he never had been known to make one before: and Newton asserts that he never heard him guilty of it afterwards. It deserves, therefore, bad as it was, to be recorded.
Chapter XLIV
"——but to stick to my route
'Twill be hard, if some novelty can't be struck out.
Is there no Algerine, no Kamschatkan arrived?
No plenipo-pacha, three-tail'd and three wived?
No Russian, whose dissonant, consonant name
Almost rattles to fragments the trumpet of fame?