“My private journals.”
“Oh, I see,” said Aaron. “I will have a turn at them, with your permission. But what is this so carefully bound with red tape, and sealed, and marked—let me see, ‘Thomas Cringle, his log-book.’”
He looked at me.—“Why, my dear sir, to say the truth, that is my first attempt; full of trash, believe me;—what else could you expect, from so mere a lad as I was when I wrote it?”
“The child is father to the man, Tom, my boy; so may I peruse it; may I read it for the edification of my learned allies,—Pepperpot Wagtail, and Paul Gelid, esquires?”
“Certainly,” I replied, “no objection in the world, but you will laugh at me, I know; still, do as you please, only, had you not better have your wound dressed first?”
“My wound! Poo, poo! just enough to swear by—a flea-bite never mind it; so here goes”—and he read aloud what is detailed in the “Launching of the Log,” making his remarks with so much naivete, that I daresay the reader will be glad to hear a few of them. His anxiety, for instance, when he read of the young aide-de-camp being shot and dragged by the stirrup, to know “what became of the empty horse,” was very entertaining; and when he had read the description of Davoust’s face and person, where I describe his nose, as neither fine nor dumpy—a fair enough proboscis as noses go, he laid down the Log with the most laughable seriousness.
“Now,” quoth he, “very inexplicit all this, Tom. Why, I am most curious in noses. I judge of character altogether from the nose. I never lose sight of a man’s snout, albeit I never saw the tip of my own. You may rely on it, that it is all a mistake to consider the regular Roman nose, with a curve like a shoemaker’s paring knife, or the straight Grecian, with a thin transparent ridge, that you can see through, or the Deutsch meerschaum, or the Saxon pump-handle, or the Scotch mull, or any other nose, that can be taken hold of, as the standard gnomon. No, no; I never saw a man with a large nose who was not a blockhead—eh! Gelid, my love? The pimple for me—the regular pimple but allons.”—And where, having introduced the German refugees to Captain Deadeye, I go on to say that I thereupon dived into the midshipmen’s berth for a morsel of comfort, and was soon “far into the secrets of a pork pie,”—he lay back, and exclaimed with a long drawling emphasis—“A pork pie!”
“A pork pie!” said Paul Gelid.
“Why, do you know,” said Mr Wagtail—“I—why, I never in all my life saw a pork pie.”
“My dear Pepperpot,” chimed in Gelid, “we both forget. Don’t you remember the day we dined with the Admiral at the pen, in July last?”