Was it his fault that fate was
not equally ready to meet him? HIS share of the business
was always done: he was ever prepared for the worst; but
the most critical circumstances never disturbed the
gravity of his carriage, and the fact of our being destined
to go to the bottom before tea-time would not have caused
him to lay out the dinner-table a whit less symmetrically.
Still, I own, the style of his service was slightly
depressing. He laid out my clean shirt of a morning as
if it had been a shroud; and cleaned my boots as though
for a man ON HIS LAST LEGS. The fact is, he was imaginative
and atrabilious, - contemplating life through a medium of
the colour of his own complexion.
This was the cheerful kind of report he used invariably
to bring me of a morning. Coming to the side of my cot
with the air of a man announcing the stroke of doomsday,
he used to say, or rather, TOLL -
"Seven o'clock, my Lord!"
"Very well; how's the wind?"
"Dead ahead, my Lord - DEAD!"
"How many points is she off her course?"
"Four points, my Lord - full four points!" (Four points
being as much as she could be.)
"Is it pretty clear?
