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Nearer is the Branch, also a coal-loaded brig, a circumstance which suggests to Peggotty the parenthetical remark that "at times there is a good deal of coal about the shingle." A little more to the east is "the Rooshian wessel Nicholas I.," in which Peggotty has a special interest so strong that he forgets to mention what her cargo was.
He has been here for forty-eight years, and the fact is, in that time, he has seen so many wrecks that the timbers are, as it were, floating in an indistinguishable mass through his mind, and when he tries to recall events connected with them, the jib-boom of "the Rhoda brig" gets mixed up with the rigging of "the Spendthrift," and "the Branch, a coal-loaded brig," that came to grief thirty years ago, gets inextricably mixed up with the "Rooshian wessel."
"Oh, Sister Arvilly!" sez Elder Wessel, and he looked as if he would faint away. And I too wuz shocked to my soul, specially as Josiah whispered kinder low to me: "Samantha, we might git a small idol whilst we're here. You know it would come handy in hayin' time and when the roads are drifted full."
"Why, sir, we hadn't not so much as a pocket-handkerchief aboard. We tried a big handful of salt, but that made him holler awful before he lost his senses, and the wessel was makin' such heavy weather of it, we couldn't spare a man to hould him when he was rollin' on the cabin floor." "Yes, sir; Lord, save us!" said another battered, begrimed fellow.
For a second Wessel feared that he had been too damned funny, for the gallants made as though to prick him through. "I heard a man on the stairs," he said hastily, "full five minutes ago, it was. He most certainly failed to come up." He went on to explain his absorption in "The Faerie Queene" but, for the moment at least, his visitors, like the great saints, were anaesthetic to culture.
Tar pees shum news of t'at wessel, eh? Tar don't pee no news of mine poor Tite, eh?" The old man extended his trembling hand and grasped the Dominie's arm nervously, his face became as pale as marble, and his whole system shook with excitement. "Tar shall come news as t' wessel mine Tite shails in comes pack," he ejaculated, "an tar pees no news of mine poor poy, eh?"
Bein' driv out of that position Elder Wessel tried a new tact: "The poor man has just as much right to the social enjoyment they git out of their saloon as you have, madam, to your afternoon teas and church socials." "What hinders the poor man from 'tendin' socials?" sez Arvilly, spiritedly. "They are always bein' teased to, and anyway I never knew tea to make anybody crazy drunk."
"You'll excuse me, sir," said Thompson, "but if I didn't know you better, I should say, to hear you talk in that uncommonly queer way, that you were as big a wessel as any of 'em. Don't flatter yourself you are dreaming, when you never were wider awake in all your life."
Lucia Wessel, too, wuz holding her young charge by the hand, but her attention wuz all drawed off by another young chap that I'd seen with her a number of times, and I didn't like his looks; he had the same sort of a dissipated look that the other young man had, but I see by the expression of Lucia's innocent eyes that she didn't share in my opinion; she looked as if she wuz fairly wropped up in him.
He thought of the pole in the corner and quailed in his belly, but the utter despair of the two men dulled their astuteness. "It would take a ladder for any one not a tumbler," said the wounded man listlessly. His companion broke into hysterical laughter. "A tumbler. Oh, a tumbler. Oh " Wessel stared at them in wonder.
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