“Queer old stick, that!” said the commodore, as he unbuckled his sword and laid it on the table.
“Ah! he grew here, and will blow away one of these days. My father used to tell me that he looked just the same when he first sprouted as he does now. But he is a dear faithful old stump; and you must remember hearing, Cleveland, of that frightful earthquake here in seventeen hundred and eighty-three, which killed so many people? Yes? Well, it was old Clinker who saved my sweet wife that is now––and her sister; though he was nearly squeezed––drier, if any thing, than he is now––in doing it. He lay, you know, Stingo, supporting the whole second story of the house for seven hours, pressed as flat as a tamarind-leaf, while they were getting those twin babies out of their cradle. Yes, God bless him!” Starting up, while a flush of feeling darkened his face––“but, what is more, he threw himself precisely where he did, as he saw the walls giving way, so that not a hair of those children should be injured when the beams came down. My father has told me since, that when they got a lever under the timber and wedged old Clinker out, he gave a kind of cackle; but, in my opinion, he has not drawn a breath from that day to this. And, generally, he is a very taciturn old root, and rarely opens his rind; but latterly he talks a good deal about the earthquake; says he’s sure there’ll be another awful one before an interval of forty years has passed, and wants us to go away. No objection, however, to coming back when the thing is over, and then waiting forty years for another. Don’t laugh, you Paddy Burns, for if ever the ‘Tremblor’ gives you one little shake, you’ll jump higher than you did when that ugly Frenchman ran you through your waistcoat pocket, and you thought it was your midriff. Now, Tom Stewart and Don Stingo, what are you grinning about? Your teeth will chatter so fast at the next quake that you won’t, either of you, be able to deliver a charge to the jury over a false invoice, or suck another drop of old Antigua rum.”
“But really, Piron,” broke in the commodore upon this voluble harangue, “do you give heed to these barkings of that old clerk?”
“Why, yes, Cleveland,” replied Piron, with rather a grave manner, “I do; and, moreover, my sweet wife Rosalie out yonder, who has never got over her grief for the loss of our boy, regards every word old Clinker says as so much prophecy; and the upshot of the business is, I have made up my mind to leave the island.”
“For where, my friend––back to France?”
“No. Since the war and the peace, with Bonaparte at St. Helena, France is no place for an Englishman, even with a French father, and I am going to try America.”
“Truly, Piron, I am charmed to hear it. But what part of America?”
“Why, I’ve bought a fine sugar estate at a bargain in Louisiana, and there we shall pass the remainder of our days.”