“I think I could cure them, if I were permitted to try.”
“I should like to hear how you’d manage that, Mr Simple.”
“Why, I would oblige a man to drink off a half pint of liquor, and then put him by himself. I would not allow him companions to make merry with, so as to make a pleasure of intoxication. I would then wait until next morning when he was sober, and leave him alone with a racking headache until the evening, when I would give him another dose, and so on, forcing him to get drunk until he hated the smell of liquor.”
“Well, Mr Simple, it might do with some, but many of our chaps would require the dose you mention to be repeated pretty often before it would effect a cure; and what’s more, they’d be very willing patients, and make no wry faces at their physic.”
“Well, that may be, but it would cure them at last. But tell me, Swinburne, were you ever in a hurricane?”
“I’ve been in everything, Mr Simple, I believe, except a school, and I never had no time to go there. Did you see that battery at Needham Point? Well, in the hurricane of ’82, them same guns were whirled away by the wind, right over to this point here on the opposite side, the sentries in their sentry-boxes after them. Some of the soldiers who faced the wind had their teeth blown down their throats like broken ’baccy pipes, others had their heads turned round like dog vanes; ’cause they waited for orders to the ‘right about face,’ and the whole air was full of young niggers, blowing about like peelings of ingons.”
“You don’t suppose I believe all this, Swinburne?”
“That’s as may be, Mr Simple; but I’ve told the story so often, that believe it myself.”
“What ship were you in?”
“In the Blanche, Captain Faulkner, who was as fine a fellow as poor Captain Savage, whom we buried yesterday; there could not be a finer than either of them. I was at the taking of the Pique, and carried him down below after he had received his mortal wound. We did a pretty thing out here when we took Fort Royal by a coup-de-main, which means, boarding from the main-yard of the frigate, and dropping from it into the fort. But what’s that under the moon?—that a sail in the offing.”