"The ball we sent through his brains lodged there; but pass the bottle o'stingo over here, and let us say no more about it; for sometimes I think he rises out o' the water o' nights, with the anchor on his back, and knocks at the door—and faith, I shall quit this place when I can!"
The reader may imagine the horror and repugnance with which I listened to these terrible details of the inner life of the inhabitants of this solitary beacon. After they had drunk and smoked for a time, during which the woman gave them all the shore gossip, squared accounts to their satisfaction, and concealed the jewellery and trinkets about her person, she said,—
"And now about this boy that you have on board—I mean above stairs?"
"Well, and wot about him?" asked Bill surlily.
"Didn't we cotch the young varmint making signals to a foreign schooner?" added Knuckleduster, with a sonorous expletive.
"How did you know her to be foreign?" asked Mother Snatchblock.
"By the swabs that hung over her side, and the lubberly way she lay to and then hauled her wind again, when filling her foreyard and standing off. She nearly lost her rudder on the shoal, so that youngster's signal might have cost her dear if the wind had freshened."
"You've been feeding this young biscuit-nibbler too well," said the kind Mrs. Snatchblock; "starve him, Bill—for starvation is the best tamer I know of."
"Now that you speak out, I think we shall."
"And a little starving, or saving, its the same thing, will increase the profit o' wot we makes on him, by giving him up to government, so pass the bottle of Old Tom over 'for a last pull.'"