“Whin we hove them mules over the side, I noticed one as was coollured most peculiar, all sthripes ov black on a white skin, jist like one ov them zaybrays they haves in the sarcus show, an’ they’re called so, by the same token, ’case they brays like a donkey and comes over the zay, you see?”
“Aye, we see,” said the hands, winking at each other and whispering that Pat was “carrying on finely this morning!”
“Well, bhoys, as I was a sayin’,” continued the narrator, serving out pannikins of hot coffee to the watch the while, and so attending to duty and pleasure in the same breath, “I notic’t this sthripy mule when it was chucked over the side at the beginning of the month. It was last August twelvemonth as how we was crossing the Line; and, after pitching the poor brute over, we sailed on and on—would you belayve it?—aye, for thray weeks longer, as I’m a living sinner, whin one foine mornin’, jist the same as this now, the look-out man sings out as he says a boat floating ahid ov the schooner! Our old man, thinkin’ there might be sowls in the blissid thing, puts the vessel off ov her coorse to fetch to windward ov it; and blest if what the look-out man thought was a boat wasn’t the self-same carkiss ov that there sthripy mule we hove over three weeks before!”
“You’ll do,” was the comment of Jorrocks to this story. “You ’mind me, Pat, of a yarn I heard once about an old lady and a chap who knew how to ‘bowse his jib up,’ same as yourself.”
“What was that?” I asked, seeing that Jorrocks looked as if he were primed up to fire off another story, and only needed a little pressing to make him reel it out.
“Lord, Mister Leigh, it ain’t nothing to speak of,” he began, with a preliminary hitch of his trowser stocks; “it’s only what them book-people calls a nanny goat.”
“An anecdote, eh?” I said. “Well, that’ll be all the better. Heave ahead with it now you’re on the tack.”
“All right, then,” replied Jorrocks. “Here goes. You must know as how this old lady were going over the Atlantic for the fust time, being on a voyage from Falmouth to Saint Kitts, in the West h’Indies; and she were mighty curious, when she had rekivered from sea-sickness, about all the strange sights o’ the h’ocean, pestering the cap’en to death with questions.
“One day she tackled the old man ’bout flying fish. ‘Bless me, Mr Capting,’ she says, ‘is it really true as how there be fishes as fly hereabouts?’
“Now, it were just on to noon that day, and the old man was busy ’bout taking a sight o’ the sun, the same as you’re so handy with, Mister Leigh; so he says to the old lady, ‘I’m engaged, mum, at present, but if you axes that man there at the wheel while I goes below, he’ll tell you all about it.’