Not a little astonished by this question, I supplied him with the information he desired.
“Thought as much,” said he, mildly jerking his fist. “Two days wrong. Yesterday was my birthday and a’ never knew it.”
“Did you say that you are bound to the Clyde?”
“That’s where this cargo’s consigned to,” he answered, “and of course us men go along with it.”
“What are you doing down in these latitudes?”
He gazed round the sea with a lost-my-way expression of eye, and replied:
“I don’t know where we are.”
“The Canary Islands bear about thirty leagues east-southeast,” said I.
He stared at the horizon as though, by looking hard, he would see the Canary Islands.
“Pray, what are you?” said I, looking at him and then glancing at his little ship and the three men who sat disconsolately clasping their knees on top of the deck-load.