He sat there for some time in cheerful silence, and drank in the exhilarating air, his pea cloth jacket thrown open to the breeze, baring the broad expanse of flannel shirt beneath.
“A few days o’ this’ll put me right on my feet,” he said, with delight, “better’n all the tonics the old sawbones ever invented. Lord! if I’d had this breeze a-blowin’ inter my winder up there to the hospital, I’d been out a fortnight ago.
“The old man ain’t dead yet. It was a pretty hard tug, I admit; but here I be!”
He slapped his leg with such vigor that a flock of sparrows flew up with sudden affright from the path; but this energetic gesture was taken in another sense by the group of urchins which had gathered near by to talk and fight (much after the manner of their feathered prototypes, by the way) over the morning’s sale of papers.
At the old man’s motion half a dozen of these sharp eyed little rascals broke away from the group, and ran shrieking toward him, wildly waving their few remaining wares in his face.
“’Ere you are, sir! Tribune, Sun, World!”
“Tribune,” said the old sailor, laughing heartily as though he saw something extremely ludicrous in their mistake.
“My last ’un, sir. Thankee!”
The successful Arab pocketed his money and went back to his friends, while the sailor slowly unfolded the sheet and took up the thread of his reflections again.
“Once I get my sea legs on,” he thought, fumbling in his pocket for a pair of huge, steel bowed spectacles, which he carefully wiped and placed astride his nose “once I get my sea legs on, I’ll take a trip up ter Rhode Island and see the cap’n’s boy, unless he turns up in answer to my letter.