I had benefited by more extraordinary hints before now, although, well as I knew the sagacity of the poor brute, I could not venture to hope it would come up to the expectations of Mrs Mangrove. But I’ll try. “Here, Sneezer, here, my boy; you must go home with Peter tonight, or we shall all get into a deuced mess; so here, my boy, here is the bight of the handkerchief again, and through the window you must go; come, Sneezer, come.”
To my great joy and surprise, the poor dumb beast rose from where he had coiled himself at my feet, and after having actually embraced me, by putting his forepaws on my shoulders, as he stood on his hind legs, and licked my face from ear to ear, uttering a low, fondling, nuzzling sort of whine, like a nurse caressing a child, he at once leapt on the window sill, put his forepaws through the handkerchief, and was dropped to the ground again. I could immediately perceive the two dark figures of the pilot and his wife, followed by the dog, glide away as noiselessly as if they had been spirits of the night, until they were lost under the shade of the thick jungle.
I turned in, and—what will not youth and fatigue do?—I fell once more fast asleep, and never opened my eyes until Obed shook me in my cot about eight o’clock in the morning.
“Good morning, Lieutenant. I have sent up your breakfast, but you don’t seem inclined to eat it.”
“Don’t you believe it, my dear Obed. I have been sound asleep till this moment; only stop till I have slipped on my—those shoes, if you please thank you—waistcoat—that will do. Now—coffee, fish, yams, and plantains, and biscuit, white as snow, and short as—and eggs and zounds! claret to finish with?—Why, Obed, you surely don’t desire that I should enjoy all these delicacies in solitary blessedness?”
“Why, I intend to breakfast with you, if my society be not disagreeable.”
“Disagreeable! Not in the least, quite the contrary. That black grouper looks remarkably beautiful. Another piece of yam, if you please.—Shall I fill you a cup of coffee, Obed? For my own part, I always stow the ground tier of my cargo dry, and then take a topdressing. Write this down as an approved axiom with all thorough breakfast eaters. Why, man, you are off your feed; what are you turning up your ear for, in that incomprehensible fashion, like a duck in thunder? A little of the claret—thank you. The very best butter I have ever eaten out of Ireland—now, some of that avocado pear—and as for biscuit, Leman never came up to it. I say, man,—hillo, where are you?—rouse ye out of your brown study, man.”
“Did you hear that, Mr Cringle?”
“Hear what?—I heard nothing,” rejoined I; “but hand me over that land crab.—Thank you, and you may send the spawl of that creeping thing along with it; that guana. I had a dislike to eating a lizard at first, but I have got over it somehow;—and a slice of ham, a small taste of the unclean beast, Obed—peach-fed, I’ll warrant.”
There was a pause. The report of a great gun came booming along, reverberated from side to side of the lagoon, the echoes growing shorter and shorter, and weaker and weaker, until they growled themselves asleep in a hollow rumble like distant thunder.