"We must take in a reef or two, then, that's all," said Herrick. "Bear a hand, my boy, and we'll soon turn you out ship-shape."
FRANK AND OLD HERRICK.
To work went the two amateur tailors, while Frank seized the chance of taking a good look at his new friend. The old tar was certainly well worth looking at. Tall, broad-shouldered, active, with his brown hard face framed in iron-gray hair and beard—a pleasant twinkle in the keen blue eyes that looked out from beneath his bushy brows, and a kindly smile flickering over his rugged features ever and anon, like sunshine upon a bare moor—he looked the very model of one of those sturdy old sea-dogs who held their own against England's stoutest "hearts of oak" in the old days of '76.
As he worked on, making stitches which, though they would have horrified a fashionable tailor, were at least strong and durable, he began to pour forth a series of yarns, a tithe of which would "set up" any novelist for life. Fights with West-Indian pirates; hair-breadth escapes from polar icebergs; picturesque cruises among the Spice Islands; weary days and nights in a calm off the African coast, on short allowance of water, with the burning sun melting the very pitch out of the seams—were "reeled off" in unbroken succession, while Frank listened open-mouthed, and more than once forgot his tailoring altogether.
But the stroke of a bell overhead broke in upon the talk.
"My watch on deck," said the old man, springing up as nimbly as a boy. "Now, lad, slip on them togs agin. Ay, now you look all a-taunto."
Frank was indeed improved. His shore clothes, which, with grease, coal-dust, tar, salt-water, and the rents made by the fight with Monkey, were (as the boatswain said) "not fit for a 'spectable scarecrow to wear of a Sunday," were exchanged for a blue flannel shirt and a pair of trim white canvas trousers. A neat black silk handkerchief was knotted around his neck, and his battered "stiff-rim" replaced by a jaunty sailor cap.
"Hello, youngster! the cap'n wants yer," shouted a sailor, as Frank appeared on deck.
"You're in luck, my boy," said Herrick. "Keep a stiff upper lip, but don't speak unless you're spoken to, and then say as little as you can."