Young Tom Bowling / The Boys of the British Navy

by John C. Hutcheson

To look at the table, one would have thought we had been starved all the time we were afloat, and that mother wished us to make up what leeway we had lost in the grub line by stowing our holds now as full as we could possibly manage.

Bless you, there was a dish of ham and eggs got ready by Jenny in a jiffy, sufficient to have served round the whole of our mess; while, as for the bread and butter, cut thin so as to make one want to eat the more, with marmalade and cakes and the jam, there was plenty, I think, for our whole ship’s company!

Mick and I ate and ate, I pressed by mother, and he unable to resist Jenny’s hospitable solicitude, until neither of us felt inclined to rise; when, just at the end of the feast—Mick and I being only just able then to make signs showing our inability to stow any more, speech having failed us—a most terrible bobbery broke out in the back garden, the cockatoo yelling like mad, and every other bird, I believe, in the shop joining in a demoniac chorus and lending emphasis to his screams.

“Ship my rullocks!” cried father, jumping up from his seat and making for the scullery door, with mother and Jenny after him. “It’s that dratted old tom-cat of Bill Squeers come prowling arter the birds again, I knows. I’ve sworn I’ll pison him some day; and, by the Lord, too, I will, if he’s bin and gone and meddled with ‘Ally Sloper’!”

“Aye, Thomas Bowling, just you stick to that,” said mother, spurring him on to instant vengeance, fearing that father’s loudly expressed animosity to our namesake the cat would evaporate, as it invariably did, after the cause of the commotion had made off. “The nasty beast nearly frightened one of Jenny’s canaries to death the other day; but I gave him one with my broom-handle which made him scoot, I can tell you, the brute not having come back into the garden again, as I knows of, till to-day!”

So saying, mother disappeared, with her potent broomstick, behind the hedge of evergreens that shut off the backyard from our garden, in the wake of father and Jenny, who, being more speedy in their movements, were already out of sight.

Mick looked at me, and I looked at Mick; and then the two of us burst into a roar of laughter as we followed up the chase to see the end of it.

We arrived just in time.

Jocko, who, as may be supposed, was the originator of all the row, had got up into the mulberry-tree, the cockatoo’s own especial domain, and, chattering and making faces at the bird, had clutched hold of one of his legs in his hand-like paw, trying to pull him from his perch.

This ‘Ally Sloper’ resisted with all his might and main, hanging from a branch of the tree with the claw that was free, while he pecked and bit the monkey with his nut-cracker beak, making Jocko wince and snarl and pull all the harder to get him into his clutches, the cockatoo screaming like mad, as I have said, all the while!