“Oh, my eye, Mas’r Harry! Dear heart, dear heart, how bad I do feel!”
“Why, you kept laughing at me, you wretch,” I said, as I rejoiced at Tom’s downfall.
“Surely, so I did, Mas’r Harry—I did, I did—but I didn’t think it was half so—so bad as this here. Oh, my eye! how badly I do feel!”
“You old humbug, you!” I cried in my triumph, for I was getting over my troubles, “sneered and jeered and pooh-poohed it all, you did, Tom, and now it has you by the hip at last.”
“No, it hasn’t, Mas’r Harry,” he groaned. “It aren’t the hip, it’s more in the middle. Oh, my eye! how ill I am!”
“I’m precious glad of it, Tom,” I said.
“Well, I do call that cowardly, Mas’r Harry—I do really,” groaned Tom—“’specially as you wasn’t half so bad as I am.”
“Why, I was ten times worse, Tom,” I cried.
“Oh, Mas’r Harry! don’t say that,” groaned the poor fellow, “because it’s unpossible. If—Oh, my eye! how ill I do feel!—if you’d been ten times as bad as I am, you’d have died ten times over. Oh, dear! oh, dear! How is it the doctors can’t cure this horrid—? Oh, dear me! how ill I do feel!”
It was very unfeeling, of course, but all the same I sat down close to poor Tom as he lay upon the deck, and roared with laughter to see his miserable yellow face, and the way in which he screwed up his eyes. But it was only three days before when I was really ill that Tom was strutting about the deck ridiculing sea-sickness, and telling me what a poor sort of a fellow I was to knuckle under to a few qualms like that.