“Oh, no, sir! of late years a very considerable blow has been struck against it; but even now some people find inducements to follow it,” answered the master. “I found it out to be a bad trade many years ago, and very few of those I know who still carry it on do more than live, and live very badly too; some of them spending many a month out of the year in prison, and that is not where an honest man would wish to be.”
However, I have undertaken to chronicle the adventures of the “Frolic,” and of those who dwelt on board her, so that I must not devote too much of our time to the yarns, funs, witticisms, and anecdotes and good sayings with which we banished any thing like tedium during our voyage. No blue devils could stand for an instant such powerful exorcisms.
It was not, however, till some time after this that we benefited by Snow’s inquiries among the crew.
Chapter Twelve.
The “Frolic” in a Gale, in which the Frolickers see no Fun—A Sail in Sight—Her Fate—An Unexpected Increase to the Crew—Bubble Shows that he can Think and Feel—Intelligence Obtained.
“What sort of weather are we going to have, Snow?” asked Hearty, as we came on deck after dinner one afternoon, when the cutter was somewhere about the middle of the Bay of Biscay.
“Dirty, sir, dirty!” was the unenlivening answer, as the old master looked with one eye to windward, which just then was the south-west. In that direction thick clouds were gathering rapidly together, and hurrying headlong towards us, like, as Carstairs observed, “a band of fierce barbarians, rushing like a torrent down upon the plain.” The sea grew darker and darker in hue, and then flakes of foam, white as the driven snow, blew off from the hitherto smooth surface of the ocean. The sea rose higher and higher, and the cutter, close-hauled, began to pitch into, them with an uneasy motion, subversive of the entire internal economy of landsmen.
“The sooner we get the canvas off her the better, now, sir,” said Snow to Porpoise, who had come on deck after calculating our exact position on the charts.