“Well, I’ll give him to you, then, and be the king. I don’t mind so much now that we’ve got such a good tower; and why can’t I stop up there even after the ship sets sail and look out over the sea with a telescope? That’s the way Elizabeth did the time she was king.”
“You can stay till you have to come down and be a dead Scots lord. I’m not going to lie there as I did last time, with nobody but the Wrig for a Scots lord, and her forgetting to be dead!”
Sir Apple-Cheek then essayed the hard part ‘chucked up’ by Rafe. It was rather difficult, I confess, as the first four lines were in pantomime, and required great versatility:—
‘The first word that Sir Patrick read,
Fu’ loud, loud laughed he:
The neist word that Sir Patrick read,
The tear blinded his e’e.’
These conflicting emotions successfully simulated, Sir Patrick resumed:—
‘“O wha is he has done this deed,
And tauld the King o’ me,—
To send us out, at this time o’ the year,
To sail upon the sea?”’
Then the king stood up in the unstable tower and shouted his own orders:—
‘“Be it wind, be it weet, be it hail, be it sleet,
Our ship maun sail the faem;
The King’s daughter o’ Noroway,
‘Tis we maun fetch her hame.”’
“Can’t we rig the ship a little better?” demanded our stage-manager at this juncture. “It isn’t half as good as the tower.”
Ten minutes’ hard work, in which we assisted, produced something a trifle more nautical and seaworthy than the first craft. The ground with a few boards spread upon it was the deck. Tarpaulin sheets were arranged on sticks to represent sails, and we located the vessel so cleverly that two slender trees shot out of the middle of it and served as the tall topmasts.