"Jest give me time," beamed Captain Leezur, sounding mellifluously, "'n' I can row any Pointer ashore in an argyment 't ever was born yit. I takes a moderate little spall to dew it in. Forced-to-go——"
"Ye be a lazy, yarn-reelin' set, all on ye," said Captain Rafe, grinning with affection and delight on the group. "I'm going to have ye all posted and put on the teown!"
Murmurs of rich and deep laughter.
A tall, dark form, shifty-eyed, had been insensibly moving and disintegrating me from the group. I found myself drifting strangely ever farther and farther away. I was sitting beside him on a rock in the covert of the woods, the sun setting over the bay, and all was still save his voice.
"I went to Californy minding" (mining), said he. "She ain't nothin' so wonderful of a State as you might think: she ain't no bigger 'n Maine 'n' New York and Alabamy, 'n' Afriky 'n' Bar Harbor all put into one!"
"Great heavens!" said I, scratching my feeble little cane into the earth, "is she that?"
Of all that had been denied him in the recent general conversation, of colossal hunks of salt, of grasshoppers "no larger than Dorking hens," of fishes, women, horses fabulous, I listened, rapt with wonder and admiration.
The sun went down, the moon arose, and still I listened. I was not weary, I was not hungry; I was absorbed in sincere and awful attention. But the world is callous and cold, and I shall not repeat those tales.