The larger boat backed her topsail with shrieks and shoutings.

“Frenchman,” said Uncle Salters, scornfully.  “Miquelon boat from St. Malo.”  The farmer had a weatherly sea-eye.  “I’m ’most outer ’baccy, too, Disko.”

“Same here,” said Tom Platt.  “Hi!  Backez vous—­backez vous!  Standez awayez, you butt-ended mucho-bono!  Where you from—­ St. Malo, eh?”

“Ah, ha!  Mucho bono!  Oui! oui!  Clos Poulet—­St. Malo!  St. Pierre et Miquelon,” cried the other crowd, waving woollen caps and laughing.  Then all together, “Bord!  Bord!”

“Bring up the board, Danny.  Beats me how them Frenchmen fetch anywheres, exceptin’ America’s fairish broadly.  Forty-six forty-nine’s good enough fer them; an’ I guess it’s abaout right, too.”

Dan chalked the figures on the board, and they hung it in the main-rigging to a chorus of mercis from the bark.

“Seems kinder uneighbourly to let ’em swedge off like this,” Salters suggested, feeling in his pockets.

“Hev ye learned French then sence last trip?” said Disko.  “I don’t want no more stone-ballast hove at us ‘long o’ your callin’ Miquelon boats ‘footy cochins,’ same’s you did off Le Have.”

“Harmon Rush he said that was the way to rise ’em.  Plain United States is good enough fer me.  We’re all dretful short on tearakker.  Young feller, don’t you speak French?”

“Oh, yes,” said Harvey valiantly; and he bawled:  “Hi!  Say!  Arretez vous!  Attendez!  Nous sommes venant pour tabac.”

“Ah, tabac, tabac!” they cried, and laughed again.

“That hit ’em.  Let’s heave a dory over, anyway,” said Tom Platt.  “I don’t exactly hold no certificates on French, but I know another lingo that goes, I guess.  Come on, Harve, an’ interpret.”

The raffle and confusion when he and Harvey were hauled up the bark’s black side was indescribable.  Her cabin was all stuck round with glaring coloured prints of the Virgin—­the Virgin of Newfoundland, they called her.  Harvey found his French of no recognized Bank brand, and his conversation was limited to nods and grins.  But Tom Platt waved his arms and got along swimmingly.  The captain gave him a drink of unspeakable gin, and the opera-comique crew, with their hairy throats, red caps, and long knives, greeted him as a brother.  Then the trade began.  They had tobacco, plenty of it—­American, that had never paid duty to France.  They wanted chocolate and crackers.  Harvey rowed back to arrange with the cook and Disko, who owned the stores, and on his return the cocoa-tins and cracker-bags were counted out by the Frenchman’s wheel.  It looked like a piratical division of loot; but Tom Platt came out of it roped with black pigtail and stuffed with cakes of chewing and smoking tobacco.  Then those jovial mariners swung off into the mist, and the last Harvey heard was a gay chorus: 

    “Par derriere chez ma tante, il’y a un bois joli,
    Et le rossignol y chante
    Et le jour et la nuit....