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He was a tall, robust specimen of a down-Easter, his open face reddened by long battling with wind and weather, and shaved close except beneath the chin, from which depended an enormous beard that served as a scarf in winter and even now was tucked into his jacket. "It's a curious thing, naow, for the captain and mate of a coaster to be in furrin parts a-whalin'; but we find it pays, eh, Sam?"
But the air of amused compassion with which the lusty Down-Easter, who had made me feel what the digito monstrari was, now looked down on me, raised a feeling of resentment and self-depreciation which left me in no mood to make a brilliant show of scholarship in construing my "Isocrates" that morning.
He was a "Down-easter," a class of American I had already learnt specially to dislike the ideal and real, "Yankee" of the States; but, he spoke to the point, as most of them do, without any waste of words or travelling round the subject more than can be said for some "Britishers" I know!
On Saturdays the young schoolmaster would frequently ride over and converse with Hall. The strong mind and coarse but cordial manners of Hall pleased him. He was a specimen of the Southerner possessing salient points, and was a study for the Down-Easter. Never before had he met such a specimen, and it was his delight to draw him out, little deeming he was filling the same office for his friend.
The desperation to which the slaves are driven at their forced separation from husband, wife, children, and kindred, he found to be a frequent cause of suicide. Slave-dealers he discovered were as great adepts at deception in the sale of their commodity as the most knowing down-easter, or tricky horse dealer.
The man on my left is a down-easter with a liver which has struck work; looks like a human pumpkin; and how he contrives to whittle jackstraws all day, and eat as he does, I can't understand. I have tried reading and tried whittling, but they don't either of them satisfy me, so that yesterday I concluded to ask the doctor if he couldn't suggest some other amusement.
"We'll go down into my cabin and drink a toast to their memory, Mr. Peasley. It isn't often we skippers out here meet one of our own." It is hard for a Down-Easter, even though he may have lost the speech of his people, not to be, partial to his own; and Captain Noah Kendall, of the barkentine Retriever, was all the cook had declared him to be.
After a few days' rest at my boarding-house, to which I was recommended by a touter, and which was in Canal-street, and was kept by a "cute" Down-easter, or native of the New England States, with whom I engaged for bed and board for eight dollars per week, I sallied forth to make my intended observations, preparatory to leaving for the west. Everything wore a novel aspect.
"Lane, you shall have a trial with a Dyak or a Malay, and I will give a prize of three dollars to the one that fells the tree first," said Louis. "I should like to try that with any Dyak or Malay," replied Lane good-naturedly; and he was a stout Down-Easter, who had been a logger in the woods before he was a carpenter or a seaman.
"And while they were arguing about it, a cutter shot out of the fog and hailed if they wanted a pilot. "'Pilot! says the Down-Easter, 'pilot! where for? No, thank ye, not yet, I can find my way up George's without a pilot. What bell's that? "'Rather think you can, Captain; but you'll want a pilot here; that's the bell on the floating light off Liverpool.
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