He gave the horse another pat and led him down the path into the stable. As he unsaddled him Maurice noticed the hickory wand which Mr. Johnston had left inserted between the upper loops of a stirrup.,
"Sir, I once said to a sailor who had obtained a berth ashore on sixteen shillings[Pg 148] a week, 'How do you manage to rear your family? How many are there of you?' 'Why,' he answered, 'there's me and the old woman and four youngsters and grandfather!' 'You never see meat, of course,' said I. 'Oh yes, we do,' he answered. 'Meat!' I cried, 'on sixteen shillings a week and seven people to support, four of them hungry youngsters!' 'Well,' he answered, 'I doos it in this way. On Saturday I goes to the butcher and buys a shoulder o' mutton; on Sunday we 'as it 'ot; on Monday we 'as it cold; on Toosday we 'ave what's left of the cold; on Wednesday what's left of the cold we 'ave made into ishee-ashee; on Thursday we makes what's left of the ishee-ashee into ashee-ishee; on Friday we does without; and on Saturday I goes to the butcher and I buys another shoulder of mutton.' Now," the Admiral would say with his face warm with triumph, "name me any joint but a shoulder of mutton that will supply what kept this family in meat, or the like of meat, from Sunday to Thursday?",
Like most sailors of his time Mr Lawrence possessed the instinct of superstition, a quality or element which has contributed the most brilliant of the rays to the glory of the[Pg 322] romance of the sea. He was sensible of an emotion of awe as he watched Lucy bowing to and addressing a royal apparition so well known to him as the Sailor Prince whose viewless eye might be upon him, whose invisible ear might be taking in his story whilst the wild-haired girl bowed apparently to the bulkhead or addressed the thin air..
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