“Now our purser was a mean old fellow. ‘Nanny-goat!’ he cries, when I went to ask him for the money. ‘What next, I wonder? the service is going to the deuce. No, Her Majesty pays for no nanny-goats, I do assure ye.’
“I just touches my hat and marches off to our dear old doctor. I knew he had a kindly heart. ‘Nanny-goat,’ cries he, ‘why, of course the darling baby’ll have a nanny-goat. We’ll keep it out of the sick-mess fund, and mark it down medical comforts.’ (Note 1.) ‘Excuse me, sir,’ said I, catching hold of the doctor’s hand—it was as rough as my own—‘but you’re a brick.’
“And that, ‘Nie,’ is how you came for the first five years o’ your life to be called nothing else but young ‘medical comforts.’”
“Five years!” I said, “that is a long spell for a ship to be on one station.”
“Ay, lad, you’re right. But ships were ships in those days.
“Young ‘medical comforts’,” he continued, “as they called you, in less than four years was a deal smarter than any monkey on board. Not that he could climb quite so high, maybe, but he was more tricky, and that is saying a lot. And it was among the monkeys that ‘medical comforts’ would mostly be, too.
“But the monkeys all seemed to like you, Nie; they would tease each other, and fight each other, but they never touched you. There was one animal in particular, and he was your favourite, the queerest old chap you ever saw. We got him down in Madagascar, and they called him the Ay-ay. Doctor always said he was a being from another world, a kind of a spirit, and the men used to be afraid of him. He had hands like a human being, but the middle finger was much longer than the others, and not thicker than a straw. When only a baby, he used to dip this long skinny finger in milk and give you to suck, and when you went to sleep he never left your side. Sometimes he would stroke your face and say, ‘Ay-ay’ as tenderly as if he’d been a mother to you. But the men always declared it was ‘Nie, Nie,’ he’d be saying.
“But you had one pet on board that maybe you mind on—the Albatross?”