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I would divide my forces, Dabchick, if I were you; but, you must exercise your own judgment when the time comes!"
This done, all his orders having been issued and executed in less time than I take to tell of it, Mr Dabchick resumed his interrupted, if monotonous, task of walking up and down the bridge; stopping whenever he had to slew round, at the end of his promenade, to take another squint at the dhows, and warning Adams, though that worthy needed no such injunction, to `keep his eye on them.
From among the bulrushes the coots sailed out at our approach, and the tiny dabchick dived so deep that we thought, "This time she must be drowned," when, lo and behold! she would appear twenty yards off, a little black ball with a yellow bill, only to take breath and plunge again. Sometimes in a hard winter we would hear high in the sky the cry of a weird pack of hounds.
In the hot summer weather he would bathe twenty times a day, and was as much at home in the water as any dabchick. And that was how I came to be more with him than was good for me. There was a small river not far from my father's house, which at a certain point was dammed back by a weir of large stones to turn part of it aside into a mill-race. The mill stood a little way down, under a steep bank.
You can hear his mournful cry a mile off. The Pied-billed Grebe, Dabchick, or Water Witch Length thirteen inches. Upper parts brownish-black. Breast and belly white, very smooth like satin. A black mark on the throat, and a black band on the bill, which is shaped like a Hen's. Feathers on top of the head bristly.
The young gentleman had kicked off his shoes. No sooner was the spell of contact broken than he jumped in. The water was still troubled and discoloured by his introductory adventure, and, though he ducked his head with the spirit of a dabchick, the book was missing.
"Ha, Mr Dabchick," cried the captain, as he skated up the iron ladder leading from the deck below to the chart-house, taking three steps at each bound, "so you've sighted those beggars at last, eh?"
"Yes, sir," said the second lieutenant, smiling, and rubbing his hands, having put down his telescope on top of the movable slab on the bridge the navigator had for spreading out his charts; Mr Dabchick assuming an air of great complacency, as if it were entirely through his exertions the dhows had been seen or were there at all "I think you'll find 'em there to win'ard all right, sir."
Lieutenant Dabchick came with us in command, as soon as she was fully manned and armed, an ammunition-chest being lowered down with a supply of `pills and pepper' for the little nine-pounder boat-gun we carried in our bows; when, we sheered away from the ship's side and lay on our oars, and the second cutter hauled up alongside to receive her crew and equipment like ourselves.
You will excuse us, reader, disturbing the current of our thoughts, by recollecting any of this forty novel-power of inanity, vulgarity, and pertness; but if you take up any of the many volumes in marbled boards, with calf backs, that you will find in cart-loads at the circulating libraries, and look over a page of the fashionable "lingo" the Lord Jacob talks to the Lady Suky, or the conversation between Sir Silly Billy and the Honourable Snuffy Duffy; or what the Duke of Dabchick thinks of the Princess Molly; and when you are satisfied, which we take it will be in the course of two pages, if you do not throw down the book, and swear by the Lord Harry why then, read on and be jolly!
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