Hadn’t Captain Mayne Brace told those two happy, hungry boys yonder all that would happen? And was the captain ever wrong? Not he.
“Yes, mate, I will have another slice of that brown beef,” said Charlie.
“Thank you, mate,” said Walt; “and why shouldn’t I?”
Both boys were about the same age—glorious and independent sixteen—both called the captain uncle, yet the boys were only cousins.
They loved, respected, nay, even revered, that brown-bearded skipper, as only boys that have an “uncle” who has been twenty long years on the stormy ocean can, and do.
This had been the lads’ first cruise. They were orphans, and though well educated, had been left almost penniless, and were going to adopt the sea as a profession. Their uncle had apprenticed them to the barque, and just because he liked them, they lived here in the saloon, and had a cabin all to themselves, instead of roughing it on the half-deck, sleeping in wooden bunks, and “chumming” it with the spectioneer, the carpenter, and bo’s’n.
He liked the lads, I say, and no man who is over forty, and has still a soul left in him, can help liking an innocent boy of this age, ere yet the bloom has left his healthy cheeks, or the days have come when he scores twenty and fancies himself a real live man.
Walt and Charlie to-day, being so happy at heart from having seen the sun again, were raking the skipper fore and aft with concentrated broadsides of questions.
It was “Oh, I say, uncle,” this and “I say, uncle,” this, that, and t’other all the time, until the great plum-pudding was borne in, and then they stopped their chatter for a minute at least, to wonder and admire.
No ordinary “plum-duff” this. It was large, and round, and brown, and jolly, half inclined to burst its sides with merriment, as the mate lovingly poured the rich gravy over it. Inside it was studded with real raisins, like the stars of an Arctic night in number. Those raisins were well within hail of each other, and not simply dotted and dibbled in here and there as with the point of a marling-spike.