“Serious,” sais I, “I am disposed to be; but not sanctimonious, and you know that. But here goes for a story, which has a nice little moral in it too.
“‘Once on a time, when pigs were swine, and turkeys chewed tobacco, and little birds built their nests in old men’s beards.’
“Pooh!” said he, turning off huffy like, as if I was a goin’ to bluff him off. “I wonder whether supper is ready?”
“Cutler,” sais I, “come back, that’s a good fellow, and I’ll tell you the story. It’s a short one, and will just fill up the space between this and tea-time. It is in illustration of what you was a sayin’, that it ain’t always fair weather sailing in this world. There was a jack-tar once to England who had been absent on a whaling voyage for nearly three years, and he had hardly landed when he was ordered off to sea again, before he had time to go home and see his friends. He was a lamentin’ this to a shipmate of his, a serious-minded man, like you.
“Sais he, ‘Bill, it breaketh my heart to have to leave agin arter this fashion. I havn’t seen Polly now goin’ on three years, nor the little un either.’ And he actilly piped his eye.
“‘It seemeth hard, Tom,’ said Bill, tryin’ to comfort him; ‘it seemeth hard; but I’m an older man nor you be, Tom, the matter of several years;’ and he gave his trowsers a twitch (you know they don’t wear galluses, though a gallus holds them up sometimes), shifted his quid, gave his nor’wester a pull over his forehead, and looked solemncholly, ‘and my experience, Tom, is, that this life ain’t all beer and skittles.’
“Cutler, there is a great deal of philosophy in that maxim: a preacher couldn’t say as much in a sermon an hour long, as there is in that little story with that little moral reflection at the eend of it.
“‘This life ain’t all leer and skittles.’ Many a time since I heard that anecdote—and I heard it in Kew Gardens, of all places in the world—when I am disappointed sadly, I say that saw over, and console myself with it. I can’t expect to go thro’ the world, Cutler, as I have done: stormy days, long and dark nights, are before me. As I grow old I shan’t be so full of animal spirits as I have been. In the natur of things I must have my share of aches, and pains, and disappointment, as well as others; and when they come, nothing will better help me to bear them than that little simple reflection of the sailor, which appeals so directly to the heart. Sam, this life ain’t all beer and skittles, that’s a fact.”
[CHAPTER III.]
A WOMAN’S HEART.
As we approached the eastern coast, “Eldad,” sais I, to the pilot, “is there any harbour about here where our folks can do a little bit of trade, and where I can see something of ‘Fishermen at home?’”