“Eyes like a dove’s in mildness,
Or an eagle’s in its wildness.”
Old Salt 1st. “More like a hen’s with one chicken.”
Old Salt 3d. “Or a sick rooster with one tail-feather.”
The Doctor.
“Smiles they were sweet,
Lips together did meet.”
Old Salt 1st (dubiously). “Lips together did meet? I wonder, mateys, if she wasn’t smacking them after a glass of grog?”
The Doctor.
“Clamors of war and terrible drums,
Noise of trumpets and the hum of tongues,
Can frighten the timid, but not her;
For brave as a lion, dauntless as fire,
She’s ruled by love, and not by ire.”
Here some of the sailors pretended to faint; others reeled off to their bunks, saying that the doctor’s poetry was “worse than his duff, and that wasn’t fit to give a measly hog;” while one old follow ascended to the deck, declaring that he “couldn’t sleep after hearing such blasted nonsense, until he had taken a salt junk emetic.”
The doctor would have continued his poetry, notwithstanding the ridicule of the “low, ignorant fellows,” as he called them; but he was interrupted by the voice of the mate, calling down to the cook to “doctor the binnacle lamp,” when the poet hurried up the companion-way, leaving me to turn in, and dream of