“Exactly,” sais I, “as if he would like to know you the next time he came for you, so as not to apprehend the wrong one. He often leaves the rascal and seizes the honest man; my opinion is, he don’t see very well.”
“What a droll fellow you are,” said he; “it appears to me as if you couldn’t be serious for five minutes at a time. I can tell you, if you were on a rocky lee-shore, with the wind and waves urging you on, and you barely holding your own, perhaps losing ground every tack, you wouldn’t talk quite so glibly of death. Was you ever in a real heavy gale of wind?”
“Warn’t I,” said I; “the fust time I returned from England it blew great guns all the voyage, one gale after another, and the last always wuss than the one before. It carried away our sails as fast as we bent them.”
“That’s nothing unusual,” said Cutler; “there are worse things than that at sea.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” sais I, “what it did; and if that ain’t an uncommon thing, then my name ain’t Sam Slick. It blew all the hair off my dog, except a little tuft atween his ears. It did, upon my soul. I hope I may never leave—”
“Don’t swear to it, Slick,” said he, “that’s a good fellow. It’s impossible.”
“Attestin’ to it will make your hair stand on eend too, I suppose,” said I; “but it’s as true as preachin’ for all that. What will you bet it didn’t happen?”
“Tut, man, nonsense,” said he, “I tell you the thing is impossible.”
“Ah!” said I, “that’s because you have been lucky, and never saw a riprorious hurricane in all your life. I’ll tell you how it was. I bought a blood-hound from a man in Regent’s Park, just afore I sailed, and the brute got sea-sick, and then took the mange, and between that and death starin’ him in the face, his hair all came off, and in course it blew away. Is that impossible?”
“Well, well,” said he, “you have the most comical way with you of any man I ever see. I am sure it ain’t in your nature to speak of death in that careless manner, you only talked that way to draw me out. I know you did. It’s not a subject however to treat lightly, and if you are not inclined to be serious just now, tell us a story.”