The Red Rover: A Tale

by James Fenimore Cooper

“What success, sir, in looking for a ship?” he demanded now recognizing, for the first time, the stranger with whom he had before held converse that morning. “More hands than places to employ them?”

“I am not sure it will so prove. In my walk on the hill, I met an old seaman, who”—

“Hum!” interrupted the publican, with an intelligible though stolen, sign to follow. “You will find it more convenient, sir, to take your breakfast in another room.” Wilder followed his conductor, who left the public apartment by a different door from that by which he had led his other guest into the interior of the house, wondering at the air of mystery that the innkeeper saw fit to assume on the occasion. After leading him by a circuitous passage. The latter showed Wilder, in profound silence, up a private stair-way, into the very attic of the building. Here he rapped lightly at a door, and was bid to enter, by a voice that caused our adventurer to start by its deepness and severity. On finding him self, however, in a low and confined room, he saw no other occupant than the seaman who had just been greeted by the publican as an old acquaintance and by a name to which he might, by his attire, well lay claim to be entitled—that of tarry Bob. While Wilder was staring about him, a good deal surprised at the situation in which he was placed, the landlord retired, and he found himself alone with his confederate. The latter was already engaged in discussing the fragment of the ox, just mentioned, and in quaffing of some liquid that seemed equally adapted to his taste, although sufficient time had not certainly been allowed to prepare the beverage he had seen fit to order. Without allowing his visiter leisure for much further reflection, the old mariner made a motion to him to take the only vacant chair in the room, while he continued his employment on the surloin with as much assiduity as though no interruption had taken place.

“Honest Joe Joram always makes a friend of his butcher,” he said, after ending a draught that threatened to drain the mug to the bottom. “There is such a flavour about his beef, that one might mistake it for the fin of a halibut. You have been in foreign parts, shipmate, or I may call you ‘messmate,’ since we are both anchored nigh the same kid—but you have doubtless been in foreign countries?”

“Often; I should else be but a miserable seaman.”

“Then, tell me frankly, have you ever been in the kingdom that can furnish such rations—fish, flesh, fowl, and fruits—as this very noble land of America, in which we are now both moored? and in which I suppose we both of us were born?”

“It would be carrying the love of home a little too far, to believe in such universal superiority,” returned Wilder, willing to divert the conversation from his real object, until he had time to arrange his ideas, and assure himself he had no other auditor but his visible companion. “It is generally admitted that England excels us in all these articles.”

“By whom? by your know-nothings and bold talkers. But I, a man who has seen the four quarters of the earth, and no small part of the water besides, give the lie to such empty boasters. We are colonies, friend, we are colonies; and it is as bold in a colony to tell the mother that it has the advantage, in this or that particular, as it would be in a foremast Jack to tell his officer he was wrong, though he knew it to be true. I am but a poor man, Mr—By what name may I call your Honour?”

“Me! my name?—Harris.”

“I am but a poor man, Mr Harris; but I have had charge of a watch in my time, old and rusty as I seem, nor have I spent so many long nights on deck without keeping thoughts at work, though I may not have overhaul’d as much philosophy, in so doing, as a paid parish priest, or a fee’d lawyer. Let me tell you, it is a disheartening thing to be nothing but a dweller in a colony. It keeps down the pride and spirit of a man, and lends a hand in making him what his masters would be glad to have him. I shall say nothing of fruits, and meats, and other eatables, that come from the land of which both you and I have heard and know too much, unless it be to point to yonder sun, and then to ask the question, whether you think King George has the power to make it shine on the bit of an island where he lives, as it shines here in his broad provinces of America?”