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Now every honest sailor knows that certain superstitions are gospel fact, such as the bad luck brought by a cross-eyed Finn, a black cat, or going to sea on Friday, and these eighteenth century shellbacks must not be too severely chided for deserting while they had the chance.
The humour and pathos of pupil-teaching were exquisitely brought out in his "School Board Idylls" and "Schools and Scholars"; his knowledge of the sea and his experience of fishermen supplied him with materials for "Skippers and Shellbacks" and for "Past and Present."
Them fellers were ownly the stevedores, hired at saxpence the hour to load the ship; an' they wint off in a brace av shakes, as you must have sayn for y'rsilf, whin their job was done! No, me bhoy, them weren't the proper sort av shellbacks.
A very happy pair of people were left to chat in Cassall's drawing-room as the midnight drew near. Sir James had retired early after the two good old boys had addressed each other as buccaneers and shellbacks, and made all sorts of nautical jokes.
A man yawned and swore in turns. Another breathed with a rattle in his throat. Two elderly hard-weather shellbacks, fast side by side, whispered dismally to one another about the landlady of a boarding-house in Sunderland, whom they both knew. They extolled her motherliness and her liberality; they tried to talk about the joint of beef and the big fire in the downstairs kitchen.
After every burst of battering seas, vivid and fleeting rainbows arched over the drifting hull in the flick of sprays. The gale was ending in a clear blow, which gleamed and cut like a knife. Between two bearded shellbacks Charley, fastened with somebody's long muffler to a deck ring-bolt, wept quietly, with rare tears wrung out by bewilderment, cold, hunger, and general misery.
He evidently wanted to give us the business, but he hated like the devil to pass up his rules you know how those old shellbacks are." "H'm, yes," said Newmark. The waitress sailed in through a violently kicked swinging door, bearing aloft a tin tray heaped perilously.
"Yes, sir; French sailors are not like English ones, nor do they resemble our American shellbacks, who do know a thing or two!" replied the colonel.
And, so saying, he sprang into the main rigging and danced up the ratlines at a pace that made the shellbacks on deck stare in wonderment. "Come down out of my rigging, you; d'ye hear?" roared Potter. "Come down, I say. How dare you take such liberties aboard my ship? D'ye hear what I say?" as Leslie grasped the futtock shrouds and lightly drew himself over the rim of the top.
Tammy stared at me. "I've heard some of the old shellbacks talking about things," he said. "But I never took them really seriously." "Well," I said. "I guess we'll have to take this seriously. I wish to God we were home!" "My God! so do I," he said. For a good while after that, we both worked on in silence; but, presently, he went off on another tack.
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