“The ’Mericans are gallant lads; they’re bound to whip Johnny Bull. It don’t make no matter if Johnny Bull has got more ships and soldiers. We’re goin’ to whip him. Now that ain’t poetry, because I begun at the beginning.”
“That’s so,” Jack would reluctantly admit; “but if it ain’t poetry, it’s mighty good sense, and I hope it’ll all come true.”
In those days tavern kitchens were very respectable resorts of the humbler classes of people and Jack Bell was very fond of the kitchen of the Eagle Tavern. The proprietor, Jacob Dyer, was a patriot at heart; but his house was so much the resort of British sailors and soldiers that he dared not avow the full extent of his sympathies.
In the kitchen Dicky made most of his pennies—and he made so many that they soon grew into shillings. It might have been rather a dangerous place to trust a weak or a vicious boy; but Dicky was neither weak nor vicious. He went to the tavern to sing his songs, and when he got through he scampered off home to his mother with his money and was very glad to get there. Besides, at the time when he usually turned up at the tavern to sing, Jack Bell was comfortably established in the chimney-corner and he kept a sharp eye on Dicky and promptly reported any bad manners or other small offences to the Widow Stubbs, who upon the few occasions that Dicky had transgressed always came down on him with the heavy hand of justice armed with a good birch switch.
One afternoon Dicky turned up at the tavern, as usual, and found the kitchen full of sailors from several cruisers of Lord Howe’s fleet that had rendezvoused at Newport.
“Here you are, you young rapscallion!” called out one jolly man-o’-war’s-man. “Come here and give us ‘Black-eyed Susan’ or I’ll give you the cat.”
This being the usual form in which those requests were made, Dicky nodded his head, grinned, and perched himself on the kitchen dresser to be heard the better. Having trolled out “Black-eyed Susan,” “Strike Eight Bells,” and other nautical ditties in his sweet boyish treble, Dicky got down and began to hand his homespun hat around for pennies. The sailors were liberal and Dicky was beginning to think how his mother would smile as he upset the hat in her lap, when one of the sailors, a fellow with a great voice, seized him and, holding up a glass of rum, called out: “Here, you lubber! come and drink the king’s health.”
“Much obliged, sir,” answered Dicky readily; “but my mother don’t on no account let me touch rum, and I’ve promised her I won’t.”
How glad was Dicky at that moment that he had made the promise! His mother had asked him and he had done it without giving it any particular thought; but when it came to saving him from drinking the king’s health, Dicky’s patriotic soul rejoiced that he had so good an excuse.
The man, rough as he was, could not ask the boy to break his word, but he was determined to get some British sentiment out of Dicky.