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He arranged terms of intimacy, I am sorry to say, with the housemaid; and, on the third journey, he made an alliance with the potboy at the Full Moon. The potboy remembered well the fact of the child being brought to "our 'ouse," as he called the Full Moon; and he was enabled to say, that the same "gent as had brought the boy backards and forrards," had since that been at the parsonage.
Then quite involuntarily the thought sprang upon her that he was a fine fellow, and she remembered the line of his stalwart figure as he walked down the street. There would be a parlour behind the bar, in which she would sit. She would be mistress of the house. There would be a servant, a potboy, and perhaps a barmaid.
I have established it as a certain fact, that they always begin to crow when the public-house shutters begin to be taken down, and that they salute the potboy, the instant he appears to perform that duty, as if he were Phoebus in person.
There was now no light within but what was shed by the fire and two tallow candles that gutter'd on the mantelshelf. The remaining candlesticks lay in a pool of wine on the floor, amid broken glasses, bottles, scattered coins, dice boxes and pewter pots. In the corner to my right cower'd a potboy, with tankard dangling in his hand, and the contents spilling into his shoes.
A potboy, rushing past with his arms full of tankards, bumped into the landlord; but not even this aroused him. His gaze wandered from the right-hand bench to the left-hand bench, and back again, from the nut-brown military countenance of Captain Zachary du Puys, soldier of fortune, to the sea-withered countenance of Joseph Bouchard, master of the good ship Saint Laurent, which lay in the harbor.
He was married, and had had three children, of whom one only was living a boy of ten years old, whom he hoped to get into the public-house as a potboy for a beginning. Like Taylor, the world had well-nigh overpowered John entirely crushed him out of all shape, so that what he was originally, or might have been, it was almost impossible to tell. There was no particular character left in him.
"They mostly does," said the potboy, not without some feeling of pride in the immunities of his sex. "Here he is," said Hugh, as he entered the parlour. "My boy, there's papa."
In all of this there was the sound of angry misery and unsatisfied hate, and the mortified impatience of something accustomed to triumph. Bewitched by this wild, inhuman music the "travellers' room" seemed spellbound for ever, but all at once the door creaked and the potboy, in a new print shirt, came in.
At the hour named, the expedition, with many a promise that the music should be sweet, departed hilariously: Will Burdock, the left-handed cricketer and hard-hitter, being leader; with Peter Bartholomew, potboy, John Girling, miller's man, and Ned Thewk, gardener's assistant, for lieutenants. On the march, silence was proclaimed, and partially enforced, after two fights against authority.
Mrs MacStinger's eloquence having rendered all other sounds but imperfectly distinguishable, he had looked for no rarer visitor than the potboy or the milkman; wherefore, when Florence appeared, and coming to the confines of the island, put her hand in his, the Captain stood up, aghast, as if he supposed her, for the moment, to be some young member of the Flying Dutchman's family.
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