CHAPTER XI.
HE SEES A STRANGE LIGHT.
Well, the sailors made a great pet of this immense monkey, who proved a very inoffensive, gentle, well-tamed creature, abounding in such tricks as a rough forecastle would educate a monkey in. The Jacks tried him with a pipe of tobacco, and he was observed to take several whiffs with an air of great relish, though he put the pipe down long before the bowl was empty. Once, seeing a man shaving, he imitated the fellow to such perfection as to show that he had been taught to feign to handle a razor; whereupon the carpenter shaped a piece of wood to resemble a razor, with which the monkey, whenever he was asked, would shave himself, pretending to lather his beard, after, with his own hands, putting a little bit of canvas under his chin. The sailors also discovered that the creature could play the fiddle—that is to say, if you put two sticks in his hand and told him to fiddle, he would adjust one of them to his shoulder, and saw away with the other, making the most horrible faces the while, as though ravished by the exquisite sounds he was producing.
Again and again would I stand watching him till the tears flowed from my eyes. The sailors called him Old Jacob, dimly conceiving that was a good name for anything with a white beard. But alas! the ocean had marked him for her own, and poor Old Jacob did not live to see land again. His death was very tragical, and the manner in which I was startled by it leaves the incident, to this moment, very clear in my memory.
We had run out of the north-east trades, and were sweeping along over a high sea before a strong breeze of wind. We had met with a bothersome spell of baffling weather north of the equator, and the captain was now “cracking on,” as the term goes, to make up for lost time, carrying a main-royal, when, at an earlier season, he would have been satisfied with a furled topgallant sail, and through it the Lady Violet was thundering with foam to the hawse-pipe, the weather-clew of her mainsail up, and the foretop-mast staysail and jibs flapping and banging in the air over the forecastle, where they were becalmed by the forecourse and topsail.
“WOULD SHAVE HIMSELF.”