Knowing that he had got them for Alister, I was rather surprised one day when Dennis began picking out some of the rarest birds and put them aside. It was so unlike him to keep things for himself. But as he turned over the specimens, he began to ask me about Cripple Charlie, whose letter he had read. Meanwhile he kept selecting specimens, and then, returning them to the main body again, “Ah, we mustn’t be robbing Alister, or he’ll never die Provost of Aberdeen.” In the end he had gathered a very choice and gorgeous little lot, and then I discovered their destination. “We’ll get them set up when we get home,” he said; “I hope Charlie ’ll like ’em. They’ll put the old puffin’s nose out of joint, anyway, for as big as it is!”
Our ship was a steamship, a well-found vessel, and we made a good passage. The first mate was an educated man, and fond of science. He kept a meteorological log, and the pleasantest work we ever did was in helping him to take observations. We became very much bitten with the subject, and I bought three pickle-bottles from the cook, and filled them with gulf-weed and other curiosities for Charlie, and stowed these away with the birds.
Dennis found another letter from his father await
ing him at the Halifax post-office. The squire had discovered his blunder, and sent the money, and the way in which Dennis immediately began to plan purchases of all sorts, from a birch-bark canoe to a bearskin rug, gave me a clue to the fortunes of the O’Moores. I do not think he would have had enough left to pay his passage if we had been delayed for long. But our old ship was expected any hour, and when she came in we made our way to her at once, and the upshot of it all was, that Dennis and I shipped in her for the return voyage as passengers, and Alister as a seaman.
Nothing can make the North Atlantic a pleasant sea. Of the beauty and variety of warmer waters we had nothing, but we had the excitement of some rough weather, and a good deal of sociability and singing when it was fair, and we were very glad to be with our old mates again, and yet more glad that every knot on our course was a step nearer home. Dennis and I were not idle because we were independent, and we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. As to Alister, there was no difficulty in seeing how well he stood with the red-bearded captain, and how good a friend his own energy and perseverance (with perhaps some touch of clannishness to boot) had gained for him. Dennis and I always shared his watches, and they were generally devoted to the discussing and re-discussing
of our prospects, interspersed with fragmentary French lessons.
From the day that Alister had heard Dennis chatter to the squaw, through all our ups and downs, at sea and ashore, he had never flagged in his persistent profiting by Dennis’s offer to teach him to speak French. It was not, perhaps, a very scholarly method which they pursued, but we had no time for study, so Dennis started Alister every day with a new word or sentence, and Alister hammered this into his head as he went about his work, and recapitulated what he had learned before. By the time we were on our homeward voyage, the sentences had become very complex, and it seemed probable that Alister’s ambition to take part in a “two-handed crack” in French with his teacher, before the shamrock fell to pieces, would be realized.
“What he has learnt is wonderful, I can tell ye,” said Dennis to me, “but his accent’s horrid! And we’d get on faster than we do if he didn’t argue every step we go, though he doesn’t know a word that I’ve not taught him.”
But far funnier than Alister’s corrections of his teacher, was a curious jealousy which the boatswain had of the Scotch lad’s new accomplishment. We could not quite make out the grounds of it, except that the boatswain himself had learned one or two
words of what he called parly voo when he was in service at the boys’ school, and he was jealously careful of the importance which his shreds and scraps of education gave him in the eyes of the ordinary uneducated seaman. With Dennis and me he was uniformly friendly, and he was a most entertaining companion.