"IF YOU PLEASE, SIR, I CAN'T BEAR TO LEAVE NANNY BEHIND."
"If you please, sir, I can't bear to leave Nanny behind. I'll take her instead of the bag, for there isn't room for both." And then, appealingly, "Can I, sir?"
Nanny went over the side and landed with him, marched by him through the desert, and when relief came bleated her enjoyment in a way that repaid him for the sacrifice. For many years she browsed among the scrap-heaps and rare grass-plots of the Brooklyn Navy-Yard, where, surrounded by a numerous progeny, she doubtless told, with many butts, the yarn of the day when her cook and master saved her up Mozambique way.
I remember some pets of my sea-going days, cherished in life and mourned in death. One was a scraggy hen, of no known breed, raised in Polynesia, and given to one of our officers by a native woman in Nukahiva. Her abnormal thinness saved her from the steward's knife in the early days at sea; but finally all hopes of fattening her failed, and she was doomed for a ward-room ragout. One of the men, a queer character in his way, who had made a study of chickens, begged permission to keep her, and as we had fresh grub enough, Nell, as he called her, was saved. In a little while it was more dangerous than a Grain Coast fetich or a Hawaiian taboo to harm her, and Nell thrived and flourished.
She was carried through all the islands down to New Zealand and Australia, and back to Chili and Peru, improving daily, and displaying an intelligence that was marvellous. She was the queen-regnant of the coop, when she deigned to enter it, and was as jealous of her prerogatives as the King of Yvetot. Her cackle proclaimed the daylight, and then there was a row if Jemmy Ducks, guardian and feeder of sea poultry from time immemorial, didn't hobble aft to give her a morning ramble to leeward. The first of the corn and water was hers, and having the coigne of vantage beyond the coop bars, all the lesser chickens, save some favored chanticleer, suffered.
She displayed a passion for bananas and yams, had strong marked personal likes and dislikes, and though coquettish, manifested an affection that was not hampered by official rank, but ran by a descending scale of years—a white-haired quartermaster possessing more than a tender spot in her capacious heart, while the ship's boys were held in a contempt beyond expression. The men vowed by all the pet warrantees of their profession that she whistled and talked, and I know she was as good a storm-glass as any standard instrument on shipboard. Her favorite roost was over the ward-room skylight, her chosen time the dinner hour, and there she would perch, eying with respectful familiarity the senior lieutenant. Her interest gradually increased as the dessert stage approached, the appearance of the fruit awaking a cooing, beseeching cackle that invariably brought her the ripest banana or the juiciest mango.
She often kept the deck officers company in the middle watches, dozing to leeward of the mast until the bell struck, when she would straighten with an assertive air, as if she had never slept, and cooed a warning hail to the lookouts.
Poor Nell died during the Darien survey, from indigestion and old age, and when she was carried ashore for burial, in the neat coffin Chips, the Scotch carpenter's mate, had fashioned for her, we all felt that she had made a place in our lives and memories that some day deserved a record.