That was a very fair yarn of yours, Tom Brown, very fair for a landsman, but I’ll bet you a doughnut I can beat it; and all on the square, too, as I say,—­which is more, if I don’t mistake, than you could take oath to.  Not to say that I never stretched my yarn a little on the fo’castle in my younger days, like the rest of ’em; but what with living under roofs so long past, and a call from the parson regular in strawberry time, and having to do the flogging consequent on the inakkeracies of statement follering on the growing up of six boys, a man learns to trim his words a little, Tom, and no mistake.  It’s very much as it is with the talk of the sea growing strange to you from hearing nothing but lubbers who don’t know a mizzen-mast from a church-steeple.

It was somewhere about twenty years ago last October, if I recollect fair, that we were laying in for that particular trip to Madagascar.  I’ve done that little voyage to Madagascar when the sea was like so much burning oil, and the sky like so much burning brass, and the fo’castle as nigh a hell as ever fo’castle was in a calm; I’ve done it when we came sneaking into port with nigh about every spar gone and pumps going night and day; and I’ve done it with a drunken captain on starvation rations,—­duff that a dog on land wouldn’t have touched and two teaspoonfuls of water to the day,—­but someways or other, of all the times we headed for the East Shore I don’t seem to remember any quite as distinct as this.

We cleared from Long Wharf in the ship Madonna,—­which they tell me means, My Lady, and a pretty name it was; it was apt to give me that gentle kind of feeling when I spoke it, which is surprising when you consider what a dull old hull she was, never logging over ten knots, and uncertain at that.  It may have been because of Moll’s coming down once in a while in the days that we lay at dock, bringing the boy with her, and sitting up on deck in a little white apron, knitting.  She was a very good-looking woman, was my wife, in those days, and I felt proud of her,—­natural, with the lads looking on.

“Molly,” I used to say, sometimes,—­“Molly Madonna!”

“Nonsense!” says she, giving a clack to her needles,—­pleased enough though, I warrant you, and turning a very pretty pink about the cheeks for a four-years’ wife.  Seeing as how she was always a lady to me, and a true one, and a gentle, though she wasn’t much at manners or book-learning, and though I never gave her a silk gown in her life, she was quite content, you see, and so was I.

I used to speak my thought about the name sometimes, when the lads weren’t particularly noisy, but they laughed at me mostly.  I was rough enough and bad enough in those days; as rough as the rest, and as bad as the rest, I suppose, but yet I seemed to have my notions a little different from the others.  “Jake’s poetry,” they called ’em.