Which I mention because I
couldn't pay the fine, having no more than a few coppers besides what
I stood up in, and was then on my way home from the wreck of the
_Duck Sammy_ brig, which went ashore on the back of the Wight.
But if you ask me what was peculiar about the man, he was called
Bart.--Sir Samuel Brooks Bart.--and lived in a fine house as big as
Greenwich Hospital, with a gold watch-chain across his belly you
could have moored a pinnace by, and gold in his pockets
correspondin'. Whereby I larned ever since to know my betters when
ashore, and behave myself lowly and give 'em a wide berth. But this
isn't one, nor the beginnings of one, for I took the liberty to
s'arch his pockets."
"Indeed, sir," our hero appealed to the surgeon, "my name is Hymen--
Major Solomon Hymen--of Troy, in Cornwall. On inquiry you will find
that I am actually Chief Magistrate of that borough. Nay, I implore
you--"
The surgeon, having bathed the wound and bound it with three strips
of plaster, took up the blister, and was on the point of applying it,
using persuasions indeed, but with the air of one who would take no
denial, when a terrible outcry at once arrested him and drowned the
Major's protestations.
The cry--it sounded like the roar of a wounded bull--came from the
deck overhead. Its echoes sounded the very bowels of the ship; but
at the first note of it Ben Jope had clutched Bill Adams by the arm.
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