'Tell ye what I'm agoing to miss in this here ramble,' exclaimed Jacob. 'That's beer, mates!'
'Beer 'll come the sweeter for the want of it,' said Abraham, with a sympathetic face. 'Still, I must say, when a man feels down there's nothin' like a point o' beer.'
'What's drunk in your country, mum?' said Jacob.
'Everything that you drink in England,' Helga answered.
'But I allow,' grunted Thomas, fixing a morose eye upon the horizon, 'that the Scandinavians, as the Danes and likevise the Svedes, along with other nations, incloodin' of the Roosians, is called, ben't so particular in the matter o' drink as the English, to say nothen o' Deal men. Whoy,' he added, with a voice of contempt, 'they're often content to do without it. Capt'ns and owners know that. The Scandinavian fancies is so cheap that you may fill your fo'k'sle with twenty sailors on tarms that'ud starve six Englishmen.'
'The Danes are good sailors,' said Helga, looking at him, 'and they are the better sailors because they are a sober people.'
'I've got nothen to say agin 'em as sailors,' retorted Thomas; 'but they ships too cheap, mum—they ships too cheap.'
'They will take what an Englishman will take!' exclaimed Helga, with a little sparkle in her eye.
'So they will, mum—so they will!' exclaimed Abraham soothingly. 'The Dane's a fust-class sailor and a temperate man, and when Tommy there'll give me an opportunity of saying as much for him I'll proclaim it.'
I was standing up, peering round the sea, for perhaps the tenth time that morning, when, happening to have my eyes directed astern, as the lugger ran in one of her graceful, buoyant, soaring launches to the summit of a little surge—for the freshening of the wind had already set the water running in heaps, noticeable even now for weight and velocity aboard that open craft of eighteen tons, though from the height of a big ship the seas would have been no more than a pleasant wrinkling of the northerly swell—I say, happening to look astern at that moment, I caught sight of a flake of white poised starlike over the rim of the ocean. The lugger sank, then rose again, and again I spied that bland moonlike point of canvas.