Chapter Two.
“A Chip of the Old Block!”
“Oh!” exclaimed mother, when an hour or so later father set about explaining the matter of our meeting Captain Mordaunt, and his promise of sending me aboard the Saint Vincent to be trained for the service. “You just go and tell that to the marines! Don’t you try on any of your old yarns with me!”
“I ain’t a-tryin’ on nothing, old woman,” protested father, after a vain attempt to continue his dinner, bolting a piece of potato, which stuck in his throat and set him coughing. “I’m a-tellin’ you the honest truth, Sarah, that I be!”
“Well, and suppose it is true,” retorted mother, giving him a slap on the back to send the obstructive potato down, “p’raps you’ll tell me, Tom Bowling, how Jenny and I are a-going to get along without young Tom? Who’s going to look after the birds in the mornin’s, I’d like to know—with twelve dozen fresh canaries a-comin’ from Norwich the day arter to-morrow, too?”
“Oh, we’ll manage all right, mother,” put in my sister Jenny, with a merry laugh. “You’ll make Tom conceited if you let him think we cannot get along without him!”
She was a bright, fairy-like little creature, with beautiful hazel eyes, and a wealth of brown hair on her tiny head that was a veritable crown of glory, reaching below her waist, and looking like a tangle of gold when the sun played upon it; and, somehow or other, she was the life and light of our home, always having a kind word for everybody, and ever acting as the peacemaker when any little difference arose between father and mother, as sometimes happens in most family circles.
Father and I when out together in the wherry, talking over home matters, would often wonder where Jenny could have come from, she was so different to all of us; mother being a big stout woman, with dark hair and eyes; while father ‘belonged to Pharaoh’s lean kine,’ as the country folks say, being tall, and thin, and wiry, with as little flesh on his bones as a scaffolding pole. In this respect, I may add, he was said to resemble all the Bowlings ever mentioned in history, up to the time of our remote ancestor, the celebrated Tom Bowling of Dibdin’s song, who ‘went aloft’ more than a hundred years ago.
Aye, she was a pretty little girl was my sister Jenny, though but a mere slip of a thing to me, who almost stood a head and shoulders over her, and she, the mite, quite a year my elder; but, what is more to the purpose, she was as good as she was pretty, taking all the cares of the household off mother’s hands and winding her, aye and father too, round her tiny fingers in whatever way she pleased when the fancy took her.
I used to like best seeing her, however, amongst the birds.