Mr Peter Swop, emboldened and brightened by the wine he had so industriously swilled, and willing to contribute his quota of conversation, having previously jumbled in his noddle what Mr Bang had said about an ostrich, and hard food, asked, across the table “Do you believe ostriches eat iron, Mr Bang?”
Mr Bang slowly put down his glass, and looking with the most imperturbable seriousness the innocent master right in the face, exclaimed:
“Ostriches eat iron!—Do I believe ostriches eat iron, did you say, Mr Swop? Will you have the great kindness to tell me if this glass of madeira be poison, Mr Swop? Why, when Captain Cringle there was in the Bight of Benin, from which ‘One comes out where a hundred go in,’ on board of the—what—d’ye-call-her? I forget her name—they had a tame ostrich, which was the wonder of the whole squadron. At the first go off it had plenty of food, but at length they had to put it on short allowance of a Winchester bushel of tenpenny nails and a pump-bolt a day; but their supplies failing, they had even to reduce this quantity, whereby the poor bird, after unavailing endeavours to get at the iron ballast, was driven to pick out the iron bolts of the ship in the clear moonlight nights, when no one was thinking of it; so that the craft would soon have been a perfect wreck. And as the commodore would not hear of the creature being killed, Tom there undertook to keep it on copper bolts and sheathing until they reached Cape Coast. But it would not do; the copper soured on its stomach, and it died. Believe an ostrich eats iron, quotha! But to return to the training for the jump I used to stick to beef-steaks and a thimbleful of Burton ale; and again I tried the dried knuckle parts of legs of five-year-old black faced muttons; but, latterly, I trained best, so far as wind was concerned, on birsled pease and whisky....”
“On what?” shouted I, in great astonishment. “On what?”
“Yes, my boys; parched pease and whisky. Charge properly with birsled pease, and if you take a caulkers just as you begin your run, there is the linstock to the gun for you, and away you fly through the air on the self-propelling principle of the Congreve Rocket. Well might that amiable, and venerable, and most learned Theban, Cockibus Bungo, who always held the stakes on these great occasions, exclaim, in his astonishment, to Cheesey, the janitor of many days—as ‘Like fire from flint I glanced away,’ disdaining the laws of gravitation—by Mercury, I swear,—yea, by his winged heel, I shall have at the Professor yet, if I live, and whisky and birsled pease fail me not.”
Here Paul and I laughed outright; but Mr Wagtail appeared out of sorts, somehow; and Swop looked first at one, and then at another, with a look of the most ludicrous uncertainty as to whether Mr Bang was quizzing him, or telling a verity.
“Why, Wagtail,” said Gelid, “what ails you, my boy?”
I looked towards our little amiable fat friend. His face was much flushed, although I learned that he had been unusually abstemious, and he appeared heated and restless, and had evidently feverish symptoms about him.
“Who’s there?” said Wagtail, looking towards the door with a raised look.
It was Tailtackle, with two of the boys carrying a litter, followed by Peter Mangrove, as if he had been chief mourner at a funeral. Out of the litter a black paw, with fishes or splints whipped round it by a band of spunyam, protruded, and kept swaying about like a pendulum.