“Here’s a pretty to-do, children,” cried the Captain, taking this view of the matter and slipping a shilling into the man’s hand to avoid any unnecessary explanations. “That dog of yours is like a wild elephant in an Indian jungle!”
“He’s a fine dorg,” observed the railway policeman parenthetically, pacified by the coin he had received and willing on the strength of it to forget alike the onslaught on pussy and the broken glass. “Finest dorg I ever seed for a retriever, sir.”
“Ah, handsome is as handsome does!” replied the Captain sententiously. “Dogs, like children, ought to be taught to behave themselves.”
Nellie, however, did not like this sort of slur on Rover’s character.
“Oh! Captain Dresser,” she exclaimed. “It was only his playfulness on getting out of confinement.”
“Humph!” ejaculated the old sailor—“playfulness, eh? A playful dog like that once bit me playfully in the calf of the leg, stopping all my play for a fortnight!”
“Oh, Rover wouldn’t do that,” said Bob—“No, not he!”
“Wouldn’t he? I’d be sorry to give him the chance,” answered the other with a laugh, as he assisted Mrs Gilmour into an open fly, into which the children’s luggage had been already put by the attentive Dick. “There’d be precious little of me left, I’m afraid, if he once tackled me!”
Nellie and Bob then got into the fly, the Captain following them on their aunt’s pressing invitation to escort them all down to her house on the south parade; while Dick, after having, with the help of the cabman, lifted Rover, who behaved like a lamb during the operation, on to the box-seat, where he was wedged in securely between the trunks and the driver’s legs, climbed up himself and away they all started—‘packed as tightly as herrings in a barrel,’ to use the Captain’s expression.
In the evening, after dinner, the whole party went down to the shore, where Bob and Nellie made their first acquaintance with the sea; a distant view of which they had a glimpse of previously from the balcony of their aunt’s house on the parade.