"Ay, mate; but if you saw the Minorca girls in their robazillas of white lace or silk, pinned under their pretty dimpled chins, and falling over their shoulders, to be lifted at times by the wind, only as if to show the low bodice and rounded bosom beneath—hombre."
"Here is a sentimental young villain, with an eye for the picturesque!" thought Heriot.
"Now, then, the dados," said Pedro, rattling the dice-box. "I throw myself first."
"Maladetto, Pedro!" interrupted Zuares. "Content yourself with rum and plunder; you are too old and crank for either of these girls to be pleased with you."
"Vaya usted al Satanos!" responded his affectionate elder brother. "The girls, at all events, are not too young for me to be pleased with them. I am not more than forty, you son of a burnt castano."
"Take the old nurse, Pedro—you'll have her a free gift, gratis, all for nothin', and Badger's blessing into the bargain. If one o' these gals falls to me," continued the talkative Yankee, "I reckon I must get shaved by the doctor, and be fixed anew; have my 'air swabbed down with some o' the cook's slush, and a hextra pull up o' my shirt collar—eh, mates?"
Amid the ferocious laughter which these and similar remarks drew forth, and while the dice-box rattled on the sea-chest lid Dr. Heriot withdrew, and crept aft, just as he had done forward, by keeping close under the lee bulwarks.
Reaching the companion-way unseen, he slipped downstairs, with a burning brain and aching heart—a heart sick and sore with apprehension for others rather than for himself; and now, with his ear tingling with countless coarse oaths, obscenities, and foul jokes, which, of course, have been omitted in our relation of the remarkable discussion he had overheard, he sought at once the cabin of Captain