“It looks unco’ like it,” I ventured to remark.
“I tell you, si-si-sir,” he sobbed, “I’m no gaga—greetin’. I’m only just letting—
“‘The tears doon fa’,
For Jock o’ Hadedean.’”
I gave him a penny on the spot, and that changed his tune.
Children by the “Sad Sea-Wave.”
There is nothing sad about the sea from a child’s point of view. On many a long voyage I have known children be the light and the life of a ship fore and aft.
Coming from the Cape once I remember we had just one child passenger, a fair-haired, blue-eyed, curly-polled little rascal whom the sailors had baptised Tommy Tadpole. He was a saloon passenger, but was quite as often forward among the men on deck or down below. Not more than seven years of age, I often wondered he did not have his neck broken, for even in half a gale of wind he would be rushing about like a mad thing, or up and down the steep iron ladder that led to the engine room. He had a mother on board, and a nurse as well, but he was too slippery for either, and for the matter of that everyone on board was Tommy’s nurse or playmate.
Catch-me-who-catch-can was the boy’s favourite game, and at this he would keep three sailors busy for half-an-hour, and still manage to elude their grasp. How he doubled and bolted and dived, to be sure, round the binnacle, round the capstan, over the winch, under the spare anchor, down one ladder and up another—it was marvellous! One day I remember he was fairly caught; he got up into the main-rigging, and actually through the lubber hole into the main-top. Ah! but Tommy couldn’t get back, and there he sat for some time, for all the world like that sweet little cherub who sits up aloft to look after the life of poor Jack, till a sturdy seaman ran up, and Tommy rode down on his shoulder.
And the waves were never high enough, nor the wind stormy enough, to frighten Tommy Tadpole.
But country children on a visit to the seashore find fun and joy and something to laugh at in every breaker or tumbling wave.