“Times an’ again I’ve heard Eli talk of his poor old mother,” said Mr. Jope, turning to the parson. “W’ch you’ll hardly believe it, but though I knowed him for a West-country man, ’twas not till the last I learned what parish he hailed from. It happened very curiously—Bill, rout up A. Grigg and Son, an’ fetch him forra’d here to listen; you’ll find the tools underneath him in the stern sheets.”
Bill obeyed, and, possessing himself of a hammer and chisel, returned to the shore. The little barber drew near and stood at Mr. Jope’s elbow; his face wore an unhealthy pallor and he smelt potently of strong drink.
“Brandy it is,” apologized Mr. Jope, observing a slight contraction of the parson’s nostril. “I reckoned ’twould tauten him a bit for what’s ahead. . . . Well, as I was sayin’, it happened very curiously. This day fortnight we were beatin’ up an’ across the Bay o’ Biscay, after a four months’ to-an’-fro game in front of Toolon Harbor. Blowin’ fresh it was, an’ we makin’ pretty poor weather of it—the Vesoovious bein’ a powerful wet tub in anything of a sea, an’ a slug at the best o’ times. Aboard a bombship everything’s got to be heavy.
“Well, sir, for a couple of days she’d been carryin’ canvas that fairly smothered us, an’ Cap’n Crang not a man to care how we fared forra’d, so long’s the water didn’ reach aft to his own quarters. But at last the first mate, Mr. Wapshott, took pity on us an’—the Cap’n bein’ below, a-takin’ a nap after dinner—sends the crew o’ the maintop aloft to take a reef in the tops’l. Poor Eli was one. Whereby the men had scarcely reached the top afore Cap’n Crang comes up from his cabin an’ along the deck, not troublin’ to cast an eye aloft. Whereby he missed what was happenin’. Whereby he had just come abreast o’ the mainmast, when—sock at his very feet there drops a man! ’Twas Eli, that had missed his hold an’ dropped clean on his skull. ‘Hallo!’ says the cap’n, ‘an’ where the deuce might you come from?’ Eli heard it—poor fellow—an’ says he, as I lifted him, answerin’ very respectful, ‘If you please, sir, from Botusfleming, three miles t’other side of Saltash.’
“‘Then you’ve had a mighty quick passage, that’s all I can say,’ answers Cap’n Crang, an’ turns on his heel.