After watching this figure some little time, it was natural that I should grow desirous to know something more about him; especially as I obtained an idea, in spite of the distance and different dress, that I had seen someone like this gentleman not such a very long time ago. But I could not recall to my mind who it was that was hovering on the skirts of it; therefore I looked around for help. Ike Hutchings, my under-mate, was at the tiller, but I durst not lend him my glass, because he knew not one end from the other; so I shouted aloud for Captain Jose, and begged him to take a good look, and tell me everything that he knew or thought. He just set his eye, and then shut up the glass, and handed it to me without a word and walked off, as if I were nobody! This vexed me, so that I holloaed out: “Are all of you gone downright mad on this side of the Channel? Can’t a man ask a civil question, and get a civil answer?”
“When he axeth what consarneth him,” was the only answer Captain Fuzzy vouchsafed me over his shoulder.
I could not find it worth my while to quarrel with this ignorant man for the sake of a foolish word or two, considering how morose he was, and kept the keys of everything. For the moment, I could not help regretting my wholesome chastisement of the boy Bang; for he would have told me at least all he knew, if I could have taught him to take a good look. And as for Ike, when I went and tried him, whether it was that he failed of my meaning, or that he chose to pretend to do so (on account of my having deposed him), or that he truly knew nothing at all—at any rate, I got nothing from him. This was, indeed, a heavy trial. It is acknowleged that we have such hearts, and strength of goodwill to the universe, and power of entering into things, that not a Welshman of us is there but yearns to know all that can be said about everyone he has ever seen, or heard, or even thought of. And this kind will, instead of being at all repressed by discouragement, increases tenfold in proportion as others manifest any unkind desire to keep themselves out of the way of it. My certy, no low curiosity is this, but lofty sympathy.
My grandfather nine generations back, Yorath the celebrated bard, begins perhaps his most immortal ode to a gentleman who had given him a quart of beer with this noble moral precept: “Lift up your eyes to the castle gates and behold on how small a hinge they move! The iron is an inch and a quarter thick, the gates are an hundred and fifty feet wide!” And though the gates of my history are not quite so wide as that, they often move on a hinge even less than an inch and a quarter in thickness; though I must not be too sure, of course, as to the substance of Bang’s head. However, allow even two inches for it, and it seems but a very trifling matter to tell as it did upon great adventures. The boy was as sound as a boy need be in a couple of hours afterwards, except that he had, or pretended to have, a kind of a buzzing in one ear; and I found him so grateful for my correction, that I could not bear to urge his head with inquiries for the moment.
To Captain Fuzzy I said no more. If he could not see the advantage of attending to his own business, but must needs go out of his way to administer public reproof to me, I could only be sorry for him. To Ikey, however, I put some questions of a general tendency; but from his barbarous broken English—if this jargon could be called English at all—the only thing I could gather was, that none but true Devonshire folk had a right to ask about Devonshire families. This might be true to a certain extent, though I never have seen such a law laid down. The answer, however, is perfectly simple. If these people carry on in a manner that cannot fail to draw public attention, they attack us at once on our tenderest point, and tenfold so if they are our betters; for what man of common sense could admit the idea of anybody setting up to be nobody? Therefore I felt myself quite ready to give a week’s pay and victuals, in that state of life to which God alone could have seen fit to call me—as mate of that Devonshire ketch, or hoy, or tub, or whatever it might be—four shillings and a bag of suet-dumplings, twice a-day, I would have given, to understand upon the spot all about that elderly gentleman.
It helped me very little, indeed, that I kept on saying to myself, “This matters not; ’tis a few hours only. The moment we get to Barnstaple, I shall find some women;—the women can never help telling everything, and for the most part ten times that. Only contradict them bravely, and they have no silence left.” However, it helped me not a little when Captain Fuzzy, with a duck of his head, tumbled up from the cuddy, brimful, as we saw, of the dinnertime. A man of my experience, who has lived for six weeks on the horns of sea-snails, which the officers found too hard for them, that time we were wrecked in the Palamede—what can a man of this kind feel when a trumpery coaster dares to pipe all hands to dinner?
However, it so happened for the moment that what I felt was appetite: and Fuzzy, who was
