“Yes, so you were,” cried the old captain, laughing. “You were borne on the books o’ the old Niobe as well as myself, and a queer little chap you were when first we met. Heigho! time flies: it’s more’n forty years ago, Nie.”
“Wait half a minute,” I said, for I knew the old man was going to spin me a yarn that I was never tired of hearing—the story of my own early years. Why was it that I liked to hear him tell the tale over and over again, you may ask. For this reason—he never told it twice quite the same: always the same in the main incidents, doubtless, but with something new each time.
“Wait half a minute.”
“Ay, ay, lad!”
I brought out the little table and set it down under his favourite tree on the lawn, and placed thereon his favourite pipe and his pouch.
The old sailor smiled, and drew his great straw chair up and sat down, and I threw myself on the grass and prepared to listen.
The captain had his two elbows on the table; he was teasing the tobacco, and when he began to speak he was evidently following out some train of thought, and addressing the tobacco, not me.
“As saucy a wee rascal he turned out as ever put a foot on board a ship,” said Captain Roberts.
“Whom are you talking about, old friend?” I asked.
“I’m talking about baby Nie,” replied the captain, still addressing the tobacco. “I wonder, now, what would have become of him, though, if it hadn’t been for old Bo’swain Roberts. Why, he would have died. Died? Ay, but I wouldn’t see poor Sergeant Radnor’s baby thrown to the sharks, not for all the world. Fed him first on hen’s milk (the name given by sailors to egg beaten up in water). Didn’t do well on that. ‘Cap’n,’ says I to the skipper one day, ‘soon’s we go to Zanzibar we must get a nanny-goat for the young papoose, else he’ll lose the number of his mess, and the doctor will have to mark him D.D.’ (discharged dead.) ‘Very well, Roberts,’ says the skipper, ‘that’s just as you like.’