To comfort him in some measure Tom gave him his photograph.
“Ah,” said the lad, “you leave wid me, then, your soul! O, I shall ever love it, and I shall weep when I look at it when you are far from poor Rooph!”
Samaro was affected also, though he shed no tears.
“Perhaps,” he said somewhat sadly, “we shall meet again. I will live in hope, señor.”
CHAPTER XIV.
“FILLED WITH GOLD DOUBLOONS—SIRR, ARE YE LISTENING?”
THE ’Liza Ann was about as strange-looking a craft as ever Tom had clapped eyes upon. He was not well enough yet to be hypercritical; but for all that he could not resist the temptation of making his boatman pull right round and round her at some distance away, so that he might see her from every point of the compass.
She lay like a duck on the water, there was no doubts about that; in fact she had about the same comparative breadth of beam that a duck possesses, the same lowness of free-board, and the same depth or rather absence of depth of hull. Her masts, two in all, were set in with a pretty, though rather old-fashioned rake. She was brig-rigged, though, considering her length, she might easily have been a barque. Her spars were not of great height, and her yards were very long. There was no mistake about it, she could take a good spread of canvas. Well, she was painted dark green all over; picked out as to ports with a lighter green, and her bulwarks inside were also light green.
Tom smiled to himself as he sized her up. Barnaby Blunt saw that smile. He was probably six hundred yards away at the time, and standing on the quarter-deck of his own ship; but he had eyes like a hawk, and “barnacles,” as he called the lorgnettes that hung in a patent leather case by his side, to aid those eyes.
“That Britisher is a-sizing of my ship up,” he said to Pebbles his mate. “Britishers don’t know everything. I’ll talk to him.”
The Yankee was politeness itself to his passenger. He had a seat all ready for him on deck under a snow-white awning, a delightfully easy deck chair, in which one might sleep as comfortably as in a hammock, or dream without sleeping.