- end_line
- 11853
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:36.274Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 11812
- text
- “there are them three chaps, there, been dogging me about for the last
half-hour. I say, Pounce, has any one been scouting around _you_ this
morning?”
“Four on ’em,” says Pounce. “I know’d it; I know’d the muffled dice was
rattlin’!”
“Leggs!” says the master-at-arms to his other aid, “Leggs, how is it
with _you_—any spies?”
“Ten on’ em,” says Leggs. “There’s one on ’em now—that fellow stitching
a hat.”
“Halloo, you, sir!” cried the master-at-arms, “top your boom and sail
large, now. If I see you about me again, I’ll have you up to the mast.”
“What am I a-doin’ now?” says the hat-stitcher, with a face as long as
a rope-walk. “Can’t a feller be workin’ here, without being ’spected of
Tom Coxe’s traverse, up one ladder and down t’other?”
“Oh, I know the moves, sir; I have been on board a _guardo_. Top your
boom, I say, and be off, or I’ll have you hauled up and riveted in a
clinch—both fore-tacks over the main-yard, and no bloody knife to cut
the seizing. Sheer! or I’ll pitch into you like a shin of beef into a
beggar’s wallet.”
It is often observable, that, in vessels of all kinds, the men who talk
the most sailor lingo are the least sailor-like in reality. You may
sometimes hear even marines jerk out more salt phrases than the Captain
of the Forecastle himself. On the other hand, when not actively engaged
in his vocation, you would take the best specimen of a seaman for a
landsman. When you see a fellow yawning about the docks like a
homeward-bound Indiaman, a long Commodore’s pennant of black ribbon
flying from his mast-head, and fetching up at a grog-shop with a slew
of his hull, as if an Admiral were coming alongside a three-decker in
his barge; you may put that man down for what man-of-war’s-men call a
_damn-my-eyes-tar_, that is, a humbug. And many damn-my-eyes humbugs
there are in this man-of-war world of ours.
- title
- Chunk 2