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They mutineed, you know." "The sculpins!" ejaculated the storekeeper briskly. "Can't excuse that. Anything but a crew that'll turn on the afterguard that they've signed on for to obey!" "That's right, Cap'n Am'zon," said Cap'n Joab. "Ye say a true word." "An' for good reason," declared the mendacious storekeeper.
The old dog knew an apple when he saw it, and was disappointed after the last one was brought out from Betty's pocket, and lay down at her feet and went to sleep again. Betty got into the shade of the wharf and sat there looking down at the flounders and sculpins in the clear water, and at the dripping green sea-weeds on the piles of the wharf.
We were snatched after the whale at racing speed and saw the fellows aboard hanging over the rail grinning at us like spectators at a horse race. "Them sculpins wouldn't grin so broad if the critter had bumped the Scarboro," declared Tom Anderly. The beast lay quiet for a bit and we pulled up on him. Before Gibson could get him with the lance gun again, he sounded.
to flag-raisin'," said the ever well-informed and officious Lunette. "Somehow," said Captain Pharo, shrugging his shoulders, "thar 's too much of a sea-rake blowin' acrost the back o' my neck t' sing 'Prison Cells; 'tain't clost enough for it here. What d'ye say to 'Hold the Fort'?" What they said was unanimous. Even Captain Leezur knew it, and the sculpins, of terrible voice.
When their fleet of boats was weather-bound, the butchers raised their price, and the spit was busier than the frying-pan; for this was a place of fish, and known as such, to all the country round about; the very air was fishy, being perfumed with dead sculpins, hardheads, and dogfish, strewn plentifully on the beach.
I remember the happy days when the haddock were more numerous on all the fishing-grounds than sculpins in the surf when the deep-water cod swam close in-shore, and the dogfish, with his poisonous horn, had not learnt to take the hook. I can number every equinoctial storm in which the sea has overwhelmed the street, flooded the cellars of the village and hissed upon our kitchen hearth.
Giggles from a school of sculpins safe hidden somewhere lent further aggravation to the dilemma. "Jakie Teel an' Pharie Kobbe, Junior, 'll come to judgment," cried Mrs. Kobbe, in a loud voice, "'specially Pharie Kobbe as soon 's ever he gits home," whereat giggling from that miscreant quarter ceased, and she relieved her lord of his painful embarrassment.
I may be forced to load it up for protection. But maybe rock salt will do instead of shot," said Cap'n Ira, still with soberness. "A feller has got a right to protect himself and his family." "Against what, I want to know?" "I can see the Ball place is about to be overrun with a passel of young sculpins that are going to be more annoying than a dose of snuff in your eye. That's right."
To lie still over the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling and the sculpins gliding busily and silently beneath the boat, to rustle in through the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil creek, to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean, lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor in the Desert could not seem more remote from life, the cool breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against the half- sunken pillars, why should I tell of these things, that I should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened with boats as with a swarm of water-beetles?
It was my woman with the flour-barrel ended up and poundin' on the bottom with the rollin'-pin to get out enough for the last batch of biscuit. The long roll beside the graves of departed heroes ain't so sad as that sound. I see my oldest boy in the dooryard with the toes of his boots yawed open like sculpins' mouths.
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