The reader, like all who are so unfortunate as to be persuaded to read to a company, was perpetually interrupted by some one of his auditors to ask a question, or make a comment. He had, however, this advantage over the ill-starred wight who essays to read to a party of ladies, that he stopped and asked as many questions, and made as many remarks and comments, as any of his auditors.
The reader, after a few verses, describing St. Paul's voyage, came to the eighth verse of the twenty-seventh chapter: "And hardly passing it, came unto a place which is called the Fair Havens," &c.; when old Tom Jones, the boatswain, an old English man-of-war's man, who was lying on his breast across the weather end of the windlass, interrupted:
"Now, as to all them places you've been reading about, I never heard of none on 'em before, except Cyprus, and I've been cruising off there in a frigate; but your Sea lashes and Pump fill ye (Cilicia and Pamphylia), I never heard on in all my born days; and as for Fairhaven, why every body knows that's right acrost the river from New Bedford; though how the d—l they got there so soon I don't see, unless so be Paul worked a marricle, and it's like enough he did, to let the rest on 'em know what kind of a chap they'd got for a shipmate."
"Nevertheless," continued the reader, at the eleventh verse, "the centurion believed the master and owner of the ship more than those things that were spoken by Paul."
"Well, now I don't see no great harm in that," said one of the audience; "Paul was nothing but a kind of Methodist parson, goin' about and preachin' for his vittles and drink, and whatever folks was a mind to give him; so 'taint likely he knowed any more about a ship than any other minister."
"Yes, but you know he was a saint," said the reader, "and could foretell the weather, aye, a year aforehand."
"Could he, faith?" said another, "then I wonder he did not make his eternal fortin making almanacs."
"But what is a centurion?" asked a third.
"Centurion?" said old Jones, "why she's a sixty-four gun ship; I've seen her often enough at Spithead, but I forget now whether she was in the first of June[4] or not."
"Then I 'spose she was convoying the craft that Paul was in," observed another blue-jacket.