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Updated: June 8, 2025
For, I confess, I was no wiser than other people, and it is well known they have an amazing tendency to identify themselves with the characters of the books they read, which perhaps accounts for the contempt that Doctors' or Clergymen's wives in country villages entertain for any body of the name of Snookes; and gives them so prodigious an opinion of their own importance, that they wouldn't visit a stockbroker or flannel manufacturer for the world.
Mr Talbot had still charge of the prize, and having Sommers as his lieutenant, with Dickey Snookes and me, he was ordered to carry her back to Sierra Leone. We flattered ourselves that both My Lord and Polly looked at us with a considerable amount of envy as we wished them farewell. Once more we were at sea.
"To see that very important personage, Mr Algernon Godolphin Stafford, commonly known as Dickey Snookes," I answered, taking his hand. He started, and looked at me very hard, really gasping for breath, so astonished was he. "What! is it you yourself, Rushforth, my dear fellow?" he exclaimed. "I am indeed glad. We thought you were lost; gobbled up by a shark, or sunk to the bottom of the sea.
He has no interest nobody to help him on so there he is growling and grumbling from morning to night, declaring that he'll cut the service, and go and join the Russians, and make his country rue the day; but he doesn't, and I believe he wouldn't, if they would make him an admiral and a count off-hand. My chief friend they call Dicky Snookes.
I could see at a glance that the schooner had been turned into a man-of-war. She had been bought, as I afterwards found, into the service. I was in plain clothes, and Peter Pongo who accompanied me, was very nicely dressed, and no one would have recognised him as the little slave boy he had before appeared. Dickey Snookes looked over the side. I sprang up the side. "What do you want?" he asked.
I felt excessively proud when I first walked the deck of the prize as officer of the watch, though that fellow Snookes would declare that the old quartermaster who kept it with me was my dry-nurse, and that I was a mere make-believe.
Sommers was appointed to command the prize, and I was not a little gratified when he obtained leave to take me with him. My traps were soon on board, and we then shaped a course for Rio de Janeiro. I forgot to say that Dickey Snookes was sent on board the prize to keep me company.
The very next morning the gale, of which the swell was the forerunner, came down upon us with a sudden gust. "All hands shorten sail," was shouted along the decks. The men flew aloft, that is, they climbed up so nimbly that they looked as if they were flying, and they lay out on the yards to reef the sail. Snookes had to go also, as he was stationed in the foretop. "Any greens up there to-day?"
We had left the land some four or five days when the wind fell, and we lay becalmed, one side and then the other dipping provokingly into the smooth, glassy, and shining water, and very nearly rolling our masts out. It was so hot, too, that the pitch bubbled up through the seams in the deck, and Dickey Snookes declared we could have roasted our dinners on the capstern-head.
When I stood in the top they all insisted on shaking hands with me, pinching my fingers terribly. "And so you want to see our garden up here," said Snookes; "you're the greenest thing we've got in it just now, let me tell you ha! ha! ha!" I didn't see anything to laugh at; but I laughed just to keep them company, thinking the joke was over.
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