"And what keeps you broiling up there in the full blaze of the sun, Sandy? The women say that they are wanting you below."
"That's mair than I'm wantin' o' them. My pleasure's above—theirs is a' below. I'm jist thinkin', it's better to be here basking in the broad sunshine, than deefened wi' a' their clavers; breathin' the caller air, than suffocated wi' the stench o' that pit o' iniquity, the hould. An' as to wha' I'm doin' up here, I'm jest lookin' out to get the furst glint o' the blessed green earth."
"You'll be tanned as black as a nigger, Sandy, before you see the hill-tops again. If we go on at this rate, the summer will slip past us altogether."
Often during the night he would cry out, "Ho, Sandy! are you up there, man? What of the night, watchman—what of the night?"
"Steady, Captain—steady. No land yet in sight."
And Boreas would answer with a loud guffaw, "If we were in the British Channel, tailor, I'd be bound that you'd keep a good look-out for the Needle's eye."
The shoemakers, in disposition and appearance, were quite the reverse of the little tailor. They were a pair of slow coaches, heavy lumpish men, who would as soon have attempted a ride to the moon on a broomstick, as have ventured two yards up the mast. They were indefatigable eaters and smokers, always cooking, and puffing forth smoke from their short brass-lidded pipes. They never attempted a song, still less to join in the nightly dance on deck, which the others performed with such spirit, and entered into with such a keen relish, that their limbs seemed strung upon wires. They seldom spoke, but sat upon the deck looking on with listless eyes, as the rest bounded past them, revelling in the very madness of mirth.
Geordie Muckleroy, the elder of the twain, was a stout, clumsy made man, whose head was stuck into his broad rounded shoulders, like the handle of his body which had grown so stiff from his stolid way of thinking, (if indeed he ever thought,) and his sedentary habits, that he seemed to move it with great difficulty, and, in answering a question, invariably turned his whole frame to the speaker. He had a large, flabby, putty-coloured face, deeply marked with the small pox, from which cruel, disfiguring malady he and his brother Jock seemed to have suffered in common. A pair of little black meaningless eyes looked like blots in his heavy visage; while a profusion of black, coarse hair, cut very short, stuck up on end all over his flat head, like the bristles in a scrubbing-brush. He certainly might have taken the prize for ugliness in the celebrated club which the Spectator has immortalized. Yet this hideous, unintellectual looking animal had a wife, a neat, sensible-looking woman, every way his superior, both in person and intelligence. She was evidently some years older than her husband, and had left a nobleman's service, in which she had been cook for a long period, to accompany Geordie as his bride across the Atlantic. Like most women, who late in life marry very young men, she regarded her mate as a most superior person, and paid him very loving attentions, which he received with the most stoical indifference, at which the rest of the males laughed, making constant fun of Geordie and his old girl. Jock was the counterpart of his brother in manners and disposition; but his head was adorned with a red scrubbing-brush, instead of a black one, and his white freckled face was half-covered with carrotty whiskers. The trio were so poor, that after having paid their passage-money, they only possessed among them a solitary sixpence.
The day after they reached the banks of Newfoundland, and the ship was going pretty smartly through the water, Geordie hung his woollen jacket over the ship's side while he performed his ablutions, and a sudden puff of wind carried it overboard.
Mrs. Lyndsay was sitting upon the deck with Josey in her arms, when she heard a plunge into the water, followed by a loud shriek, and Mrs. Muckleroy fell to the deck in a swoon.