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The next moment, and a few smoky street lamps failed to reveal the broken flagging on which he trod. Now and then the gleam of a coarse tallow candle swaling gloomily away by some sick bed, threw its murky light across his path. Still, but for the cold moonlight, Chester would have found much difficulty in making his rounds in the poor man's district.
Then he heard the sudden jingle of a bit, and presently a horse and rider climbed into view against the pure sky. A young girl, breeched, booted and spurred like a boy, drew rein, and sat looking down into the hollow. For a moment neither spoke; then Maynard acknowledged her presence by raising his tweed hat. She gave a little nod. "I thought it was somebody swaling burning the heather."
Why, my wife was in the 'Wrestler. I've heard her tell scores of times as how she was almost dead when that little yacht came through a swaling sea, that was all heaving and roaring round the wreck, and as how the swell what owned it gave his cabin up to the womenkind, and had his swivel guns and his handsome furniture pitched overboard, that he might be able to carry more passengers, and fed 'em, and gave 'em champagne all around, and treated 'em like a prince, till he ran 'em straight into Brest Harbor.
It gathered in a rose of flame that gradually lit the horizon and burnt so steadily that he knew no swaling could account for it, and, standing up, he took his bearings and decided that it must be either Farmer Angwin's buildings or ricks ablaze. Angwin was a shiftless fellow, gentle and meek, who was wont to bewail his ill-luck; here was another slice of it for him, poor man!
Here the pen had dropped from the writer's hand. The boy turned with beating heart: he had struck gold indeed. Unshipping the despatch bag, he slung it about his shoulders. Lifting the pistol, he snatched the chart, and thrust it under the flap of the locked bag. The action set the candle swaling. It shot out a snake-like flame that licked the bald pate of the sleeping privateersman.
The last line of light from the sun's setting still lingered there, so that at first it was not easy to disengage from it that flicker of brighter light which seemed vague as a candle flame in daytime. A few minutes made certainty, however, and Ishmael stared at the gathering flicker and wondered whether it were a serious fire or mere swaling.
But all this theory, absurd and ignorant as it is, is really nothing to the practice of which it effects to be the defence. Hear the warblings of Mr. Hunt's nightingales. A horseman is described The patting hand, that best persuades the check, And makes the quarrel up with a proud neck, The thigh broad pressed, the spanning palm upon it, And the jerked feather swaling in the bonnet. p. 15.
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