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Updated: June 1, 2025
The cutter was rigged with a dipping lug and a spritsail; so, no sooner had crusty old Draper given his laconic answer to Mr Chisholm, than the latter sang out to Larrikins, who was in the bows. "Look out there forrud!" he cried. "Stand by to dip!"
However, after, like `vaulting ambition, overleaping himself when trying to jump into his unaccustomed bed-place, falling, equally unceremoniously, `on t'other side, Mick succeeded in ensconcing himself very comfortably in his hammock. Now came my turn, my friend Larrikins being even more obsequious in his aid to me than to Mick.
The long day and longer night he spent in the Domain, now on a bench, now on the grass under a Norfolk Island pine, the companion of perhaps the lowest class on earth, the Larrikins of Sydney.
"Lor', Tom," said Larrikins to me, expressing the current feeling of all on board the Mermaid, "I'd die happy, s'help me, if I could only pot that there bloomin' Arab thief Abdalah, him we see'd shoot poor little Dabby.
The sea got up also in a corresponding degree, its huge billows, as they rolled onward propelled by the gale, rearing themselves up in mid-air till they seemed sometimes to be level with the top of our mainmast, surpassing in height even those which my old friend Larrikins had described as `mountings 'igh.
The larrikins turned to the chipped-potato stall as a hungry dog jumps at a bone, eagerly sniffing the smell of burning fat as the potatoes crisped in the spitting grease. "It's up ter yous ter shout," cried Joe and Waxy. "Well, a tray bit won't break me," said Chook, producing threepence from his pocket.
My old chum coached me up in the knotting and splicing of wire rope, of which art he was a proficient, his father being a working smith, and Larrikins himself having been intended originally for that trade, before the superior attractions of the sea weaned him from the paternal handicraft. In the following year, however, matters became a trifle livelier on the East coast.
Fun they thought it; but, if they had gone through the job of scrubbing down the thwarts and bottom boards of the cutter after the fray, as Larrikins and I had to do, mopping up the blood and gore, which was more than an inch deep, the fighting would not have seemed so jolly as their imaginations pictured it.
No one exactly knows how to meet the difficulty, and What shall we do with our larrikins? is likely to replace the former popular cry of 'What shall we do with our boys? to which some ingenious person furnished the obvious answer, 'Marry them to our girls. Corporal punishment for corporal offences is in my opinion and that of most of the serious portion of the community, the only remedy which is likely also to act as a preventive; but however desirable it may be acknowledged to be, there is a difficulty in bringing it into use in communities whose sympathies are so essentially democratic as those of Victoria and New South Wales for in Adelaide the police has still the upper hand.
"Larrikins," said I, whispering in his ear, as we stood up together just in the rear of Mr Dabchick, balancing myself on one of the thwarts forward, being about to make another spring for the side of the big dhow, while Larry shoved a cartridge hastily into the breech of his rifle, and was in the act of taking a pot shot at a chap who seemed to be the skipper of the batilla and had a nose on him like the beak of a Brazilian parrot, "little Dabby means business!"
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