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The bumboat and the frigate lovingly rubbed sides, and, like an angel descending from heaven, I saw Bill coming down the after-hatchway, his face radiant with the glory of expectant repletion, a leg of mutton in each hand, two quartern-loaves under each arm, and between each pair of loaves was jammed a pound of fresh butter.
"Beg pardon, sir," apologised Dobbs, the gunroom steward, who from his comical little screwed-up eyes and manner must have been first cousin to my old friend the waiter at the "Keppel's Head," noticing the disdainful expression with which Tommy Mills continued to glance round the empty table, seeking in vain something appetising in the way of food for his hungry eye to rest upon, "Beg pardon, sir, but the bumboat woman didn't come off this morning.
The interest of his supposed father was sufficient to put him on the quarter-deck; and the profits of his mother, who, having duly served her apprenticeship, had arrived to the dignity of bumboat woman herself, and was a fat, comely matron of about forty years of age, were more than sufficient to support him in his inferior rank.
But he could not keep his eyes forever shut there was the necessity of living and of doing his work in the world to be remembered always. He removed his hand. A bumboat was made fast below the well of the deck, and a boy with an obscenely twisted body and a twisted black face was selling pineapples to the sailors.
"Now," said I to the purser, "if you wish to do me a real kindness, change me some of my Spanish for English money, and let the first bumboat that comes alongside be ready to go ashore in ballast, for I shall certainly clear it." My request was immediately complied with; and my friends, for the present, took their leave.
By the afternoon of September 9 we could begin to make our preparations for departure. The engineers had replaced the propeller and tested it; all supplies were on board, and the chronometers had been checked. All that remained was to get rid of the importunate bumboat men who swarmed round the vessel in their little craft, each looking like a small floating shop.
"You haven't paid me for the monkey jacket yet," interposed Mrs Poll Nash, the bumboat woman, who was holding up the garment in question, waiting for the coin to be passed over before parting with it, the good lady having in her career learnt the wisdom of caution. "That'll make three pun' seventeen-and-six in all. Now, look sharp, my joker, or I'll chuck the duds back into the wherry.
I'll bet you this forty-six against ten that I've another job before midnight." Mr. Cleve grinned. "Always looking for sure-thing bets! Better hail that bumboat with the vegetables to row you into town. The old man'll dump you over by hand if he finds you here between now and sundown." "I'll try the launch there. Tell the lad his fare ain't goin' back to Shanghai.
The freebooter of the green-pea trade touched his wet forelock respectfully. "My name is Gibney, sir, an' I hold an unlimited license as first mate of sail or steam. I was passin' up the coast on a good-for-nothin' little bumboat, an' seen you in distress, so me an' a friend swum over to give you the double O. You're in a bad way, sir." "Two hundred and eighty-seven days from Hamburg, Mr. Gibney.
Besides stately flag-ships and poor little bumboat schooners, transports are coming and going with regiments or provisions for the same. Here, too, are old acquaintances from the bay of New York, the "Yankee," a lively tug, the "Harriet Lane," coquettish and plucky, the "Catiline," ready to reverse her name and put down conspiracy. On the dock are munitions of war in heaps.
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