When the dusk was come my uncle would turn blithely from this melancholy contemplation and call for a lamp and his bottle. While I was about this business (our maid-servant would not handle the bottle lest she be damned for it), my uncle would stump the floor, making gallant efforts to whistle and trill: by this exhorting himself to a cheerful mood, so that when 29 I had moved his great chair to the table, with the lamp near and turned high, and had placed a stool for his wooden leg, and had set his bottle and glass and little brown jug of cold water conveniently at hand, his face would be pleasantly rippling and his eyes all a-twinkle.
“Up with un, Dannie!” says he.
’Twas his fancy that he had gout in the tip of his wooden leg. I must lift the ailing bit of timber to the stool with caution.
“Ouch!” groans he. “Easy, lad!”
’Twas now in place.
“All ship-shape an’ cheerful,” says he. “Pass the bottle.”
He would then stand me up for catechism; and to this task I would come with alacrity, and my heels would come together, and my shoulders square, and my hands go behind my back, as in the line at school. ’Twas a solemn game, whatever the form it took, whether dealing with my possessions, hopes, deportment, or what-not; and however grotesque an appearance the thing may wear, ’twas done in earnest by us both and with some real pains (when I was stupid or sleepy) to me. ’Twas the way he had, too, of teaching me that which he would have me conceive him to be––of fashioning in my heart and mind the character he would there wear. A clumsy, forecastle method, and most pathetically engaging, to be sure! but in effect unapproached: for to this day, when I know him as he was, the man he would appear to be sticks in my heart and will not be supplanted. Nor would I willingly 30 yield the wistful old dog’s place to a gentleman of more brilliant parts.
“Dannie, lad,” he would begin, in the manner of a visiting trustee, but yet with a little twitch and flush of embarrassment, which must be wiped away with his great bandanna handkerchief––“Dannie, lad,” he would begin, “is ol’ Nicholas Top a well-knowed figger in Newf’un’land?”
“He’s knowed,” was the response I had been taught, “from Cape Race t’ Chidley.”
“What for?”