"Keep your glass, sir!" repeated the wooden-legged hero; "no; you don't look like one who could afford to make such a present. But I'll buy it, I'll buy it, if you'll let me—that I will."
"I'd rather you would take it," replied Robin with much courtesy, and in a well-feigned foreign accent; "for though I am a poor wanderer, one of another country, trying to pick up a little by my skill in music, and from those charitable Christians who pity my deformity, yet I love the very look of a sailor so much, that I would give even my gittern to a true son of the sea."
"Say you so, my boy?" shouted the old tar, "then d—n me now if I do take it, nor I'll not buy it either; but I'll swop for it any thing I have, and then, d'ye see, we'll have something to remember each other all our days."
"The sailors of England," pursued the crafty Robin, "are never seen but to be remembered—feared on sea and loved on land."
"You're the best-hearted foreigner I ever fell in with," said the old man; "so let us make full sail for the Oliver's Head, and settle the matter there; perhaps you'll give us a taste of your calling," touching as he spoke the cracked gittern with the point of his stick. "My eyes! how Ned Purcell will stare at this glass! His own! why his own an't a fly-blow to it."
"The Oliver's Head" was a gay hostelry by the road-side, with what was called in those days a portraiture of the Protector swinging from a post which stood on the slip of turf that skirted the house. It was kept by a bluff landlord and a young and pretty landlady, young enough to be her husband's daughter, and discreet enough to be an old man's wife with credit and respectability. There were benches all round the house, one side of which looked towards the river, and the other out upon the heath, and up the hill; and a pleasant view it was either way; but the sailor chose the water-prospect, and established himself and Robin on a small separate bench that was overshadowed by a green and spreading cherry-tree. Having settled the exchange, which ended in Robin's receiving a small Spanish dagger in exchange for his glass, the seaman insisting on his taking a glass of another sort; to which Robin was by no means averse, as he had not yet been able to obtain the desired information relative to the Ironsides.
While they sat under the cherry-tree, however, the wished-for opportunity occurred.
"What a pity it is," observed Robin, "that they don't cut canals through the country, and do all the business by water instead of land. They do it, you know, in Venice."
"There'd be sense and reason in that," replied the sailor in great glee. "I never could see much use in the land at any time."
"And then we should have all sailors and no soldiers," continued Robin.