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re mean an' humpy, an' their stummicks has to be humoured; so they come first, which they don't deserve. Aeneid that so, doctor?"
The cook nodded.
"Can't he talk?" said Harvey in a whisper.
"'Nough to get along. Not much o' anything we know. His natural tongue's kinder curious. Comes from the innards of Cape Breton, he does, where the farmers speak homemade Scotch. Cape Breton's full o' niggers whose folk run in there durin' aour war, an' they talk like farmers--all huffy-chuffy."
"That is not Scotch," said "Pennsylvania." "That is Gaelic. So I read in a book."
"Penn reads a heap. Most of what he says is so--'cep' when it comes to a caount o' fish--eh?"
"Does your father just let them say how many they've caught without checking them?" said Harvey.
"Why, yes. Where's the sense of a man lyin' fer a few old cod?"
"Was a man once lied for his catch," Manuel put in. "Lied every day. Fife, ten, twenty-fife more fish than come he say there was."
"Where was that?" said Dan. "None o' aour folk."
"Frenchman of Anguille."
"Ah! Them West Shore Frenchmen don't caount anyway. Stands to reason they can't caount Ef you run acrost any of their soft hooks, Harvey, you'll know why," said Dan, with an awful contempt.
"Always more and never less, Every time we come to dress,"
Long Jack roared down the hatch, and the "second ha'af" scrambled up at once.
The shadow of the masts and rigging, with the never-furled riding-sail, rolled to and fro on the heaving deck in the moonlight; and the pile of fish by the stern shone like a dump of fluid silver. In the hold there were tramplings and rumblings where Disko Troop and Tom Platt moved among the salt-bins. Dan passed Harvey a pitchfork, and led him to the inboard end of the rough table, where Uncle Salters was drumming impatiently with a knife-haft. A tub of salt water lay at his feet.
"You pitch to Dan an' Tom Platt down the hatch, an' take keer Uncle Salters don't cut yer eye out," s