“That you may pronounce, ma'am, and I will say Amen. Why, my eldest daughter, in her tenth year now—”
“Come, Captain Carroway,” broke in the farmer, returning softly with a square old bottle, “how goes the fighting with the Crappos now? Put your legs up, and light your pipe, and tell us all the news.”
“Cadman, and Ellis, and Dick Hackerbody,” the lieutenant of the coast-guard shouted, “you have fed well. Be off, men; no more neglect of duty! Place an outpost at fork of the Sewerby road, and strictly observe the enemy, while I hold a council of war with my brother officer, Captain Anerley. Half a crown for you, if you catch the rogue, half a crown each, and promotion of twopence. Attention, eyes right, make yourselves scarce! Well, now the rogues are gone, let us make ourselves at home. Anerley, your question is a dry one. A dry one; but this is uncommonly fine stuff! How the devil has it slipped through our fingers? Never mind that, inter amicos—Sir, I was at school at Shrewsbury—but as to the war, Sir, the service is going to the devil, for the want of pure principle.”
The farmer nodded; and his looks declared that to some extent he felt it. He had got the worst side of some bargains that week; but his wife had another way of thinking.
“Why, Captain Carroway, whatever could be purer? When you were at sea, had you ever a man of the downright principles of Nelson?”
“Nelson has done very well in his way; but he is a man who has risen too fast, as other men rise too slowly. Nothing in him; no substance, madam; I knew him as a youngster, and I could have tossed him on a marling-spike. And instead of feeding well, Sir, he quite wore himself away. To my firm knowledge, he would scarcely turn the scale upon a good Frenchman of half of the peas. Every man should work his own way up, unless his father did it for him. In my time we had fifty men as good, and made no fuss about them.”
“And you not the last of them, captain, I dare say. Though I do love to hear of the Lord's Lord Nelson, as the people call him. If ever a man fought his own way up—”
“Madam, I know him, and respect him well. He would walk up to the devil, with a sword between his teeth, and a boarder's pistol in each hand. Madam, I leaped, in that condition, a depth of six fathoms and a half into the starboard mizzen-chains of the French line-of-battle ship Peace and Thunder.”
“Oh, Captain Carroway, how dreadful! What had you to lay hold with?”
“At such times a man must not lay hold. My business was to lay about; and I did it to some purpose. This little slash, across my eyes struck fire, and it does the same now by moonlight.”