FICTION AT SEA.
It is quiet now on deck. The singing forward has ceased, the watch is set, and the larboard watch, who are to come on at midnight, are below—including the tall corporal of marines, whom we heard just now singing bass. But the little monkey of a boy, who took the tenor part in “O Julia!” belongs to the starboard watch, and now has another occupation on hand.
Seated on a tub turned upside down, close to the foremast, he is reading aloud, by the light of a lantern, out of an “awfully fine” book.
The boy (his name is Jozef) can read “real first-rate”; and from each of the listeners seated round him he is to receive the sum of two cents.
The book which he now has before him, and which is covered with oil-stains, because he has to hold it so close to the lantern,—the book which is so “awfully fine,” is entitled “Count Matatskai; or, The Bandit with the Grey Beard: A Story from the Mountains.”
Count Matatskai is a youthful nobleman who has fallen in love with a mountain maiden, the beautiful but fierce Krimhelia, daughter of a chamois-hunter. After various meetings on the rocks by moonlight, with a faithful old servitor incognito in the background, Krimhelia makes up her mind to accept the Count’s love, and fly with him to a distant country, where counts and the daughters of chamois-hunters stand precisely on the same social footing. But now a difficulty occurs, and it is this: Krimhelia has sworn an oath to avenge the death of her father, who has been killed in a fight with the band commanded by the Grey-Bearded Brigand.
This is the point Jozef has reached in the story. Several of his audience have already dropped asleep; but the reader does not notice it—he is too much absorbed in his narrative,—and continues, in his “first-rate” manner, which—heard at a distance—reminds one of nothing so much as of the soft but continuous murmur of a babbling brook—commas and other stops being, in this method, so entirely left in the background, or else occurring in such remarkable places, that a reporter would have been forced to reproduce his text somewhat as follows:—
“Krimhelia looked the Count straight in the face.
“Look at me Count said she do you see this glittering dagger as sure as the moon, hangs yonder in heaven and illuminates my pale features so surely will I thrust this, dagger into the heart of the Bandit, with the Grey Beard first and before I throw myself as your consort into your arms but why so pale Count and why do you tremble so?”
Now Jozef is interrupted by the master-tailor, a thin, little man, of whom it is commonly said on board that he knows a thing or two more than most people.