“Nie, old boy!” he cried, “I wouldn’t have known you. You’ve grown a man, and what a savage you do look! And do you know, Nie, what all this fighting has been about?”
“No,” I said innocently.
“Why, about you!” He almost shouted the last word, and I could see in his honest eyes the tears which he could hardly keep from failing.
Note 1. A tom-tom is a kind of kettle-drum. It is simply a log of wood hollowed out at one end, and a dried skin stretched over it.
Chapter Eight.
“The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!”
Proctor.
“England, thy beauties are tame and domestic,
To one who has roamed o’er the mountains afar.”
Byron.