There was something very amusing in the manner of the strapping seaman as he sat down beside the puny little boy, with a bashful expression on his handsome face, as if he were about to make a humiliating confession.
“What troubles you, Jenkins?” asked Billie, with the air of a man who is ready to give any amount of advice, or, if need be, consolation.
The seaman twisted his eyebrows into a complex form, and seemed uncertain how to proceed. Suddenly he made up his mind.
“Was you ever in love, Little Bill?” he asked abruptly, and with a smile that seemed to indicate a feeling that the question was absurd.
“O yes,” answered the boy quite coolly. “I’ve been in love with brother Archie ever since I can remember.”
Jenkins looked at his little friend with a still more complicated knot of puzzlement in his eyebrows, for he felt that Billie was scarcely fitted by years or experience to be a useful confidant. After resting his hands on his knees, and his eyes on the ground, for some time, he again made up his mind and turned to Billie, who sat with his large eyes fixed earnestly on the countenance of his tall friend, wondering what perplexed him so much, and waiting for further communications.
“Little Bill,” said Jenkins, laying a large hand on his small knee, “in course you can’t be expected to understand what I wants to talk about, but there’s nobody else I’d like to speak to, and you’re such a knowin’ little shaver that somehow I felt a kind of—of notion that I’d like to ask your advice—d’ee see?”
“I see—all right,” returned Billie; “though I wonder at such a man as you wanting advice from the like of me. But I’ll do what I can for you, Jenkins, and perhaps I know more about the thing that troubles you than you think.”
“I’m afraid not,” returned the seaman, with a humorous twinkle in his eye. “You see, Billie, you never wanted to get spliced, did you?”
“Spliced! What’s that?”