The stuttering host seemed not to comprehend this sneering exclamation, and Levin Dennis said:
"King Custis wasn't killed, was he, Pappy Thomas?"
"It was his children's children his p-p-punishment was promised to," the island parson said, "and to the Lord a thousand y-years are but as d-days."
"The tide is fuller, Levin," Joe Johnson cried, "your keel is clear. Now pint her for Manokin. So bingavast, my benen cove, and may you chant all by yourself when I am gone!"
"God bless the boys!" the islander cried, "an' k-keep them from the f-fire everlasting that is burning in your jug. And s-s-stranger, remember the end of Eb-b-benezer Johnson, an' repent!"
The old man, barefooted, stoop-shouldered, stuttering, yet with a chord of natural rhetoric in his high fiddle-string of a windpipe, stood looking after them till they passed down the thoroughfare under the jib-sail, and Joe Johnson did not say a word till some marsh brush intervened between them, he being apparently under a remnant of that panic which had seized him on the camp-ground.
"That's a good man," Levin Dennis said, giving the tiller to Jack Wonnell and raising the sail; "he preached to the Britishers when they sailed from Tangiers Islands to take Baltimore, and told 'em they would be beat an' their gineral killed. He's made the oystermen all round yer jine the island churches an' keep Sunday. That stutterin' leaves him when he preaches, and when he leads the shout in meetin' it's piercin' as a horn."
"He's a bloody Romany rogue," Joe Johnson muttered, "to tell me such a tale! But, kirjalis! he cursed not me!"
"What language is that, Mr. Johnson? Is it Dutch or Porteygee?"
"It's what we call the gypsy; some calls it the Quaker. It's convenient, Levin, when you go to Philadelfey, or Washinton, or New York, or some o' them big cities, an' wants to talk to men of enterprise without the quails a-pipin' of you. Some day I'll larn it to you if you're a good boy."