“Never mind, Peter,” I said, laughing; “all’s well that ends well.”
“Yes, my boy, unless it ends better than well, and that’s how it’s going to.”
“How do you mean?” asked Jill. “Why, in a ball. And that’s what is going to be given. There are two ships here, and I’m so glad, because there is a pretty Chilian girl that I’m half mad on, the daughter of somebody or another, and—and she’ll be there. Do you see, Greenie?”
At little outlandish towns like Sandy Point it does not take a very long time, when ships are alongside, to get up an entertainment of any kind, so in less than a week the ball came off.
It was preceded by a dinner on board the man-o’-war, at which I was pleased to note that Jill was the hero of the hour. I really felt proud of him, but Jill took it all as a matter of course.
The dinner was excellent of its kind, though I think even Captain Coates missed the big solid English joints. Here all was made dishes, dishes of surprise you might say. Peter and I sat pretty close together, Jill being stowed away among the ladies somewhere, so I knew what Peter did. On the whole I should say he did well, and I should think he must have changed his plate about twenty times before dessert.
“My object was,” he told me next morning, “to taste everything. I wanted to improve the mind as well as the body. D’ye see?”
“Oh yes, we saw right enough.” Peter never failed to be explicit when he talked. For the first time in my life, we tasted guanaco and ostrich meat, and horseflesh; and the commander of the ship positively apologised because he had not been able to procure a fry of agouti and a curry of armadillo. I for one readily excused the gallant commander, and I suppose so did Peter; though I know this much, if steak of grampus and roast albatross had been placed before him, he would have felt it his duty to eat of these dishes.
When talking grew fast and furious, which it did about the middle of the seventeenth course—“the seventeenth round” Peter afterwards styled it—I had time to look around me and note the peculiarities of my companions at table.
The principal peculiarities of the foreign officers, I soon discovered, were excessive politeness and a gesticulatory method of talking, not by any means approaching to rudeness, but strange to an Englishman’s eye. The commander was a short, stout, good-natured little fellow, very round-faced, and cheerful in eye. I do not wonder at this, if he “fed”—the expression is Peter’s—as well every day as we had now done. His officers were second editions of himself, only boiled down, as it were. There were several gentlemen from the two merchant ships, and two ladies. One of the latter was a captain’s wife, who, like our little mother Coates, preferred to plough the stormy ocean with her husband to staying at home on the dull shore.