"'Sposin' you was obliged to it, Daddy; 'sposin' you had to walk all the way up Tallack Street, and all the way acrost Cazenove Street, and all the way acrost Trott Street to Blading Street where the cart was...?" "Lard, lassie!--I could do it on my head, as the saying is, any minute o' the week!" But Jim demurs to an actual performance--says the doctor don't allow any tricks to be played. Lizarann gives the point up; but, oh dear!--how dreadfully afraid she feels that she is being practised on, and that in reality this shiny, well-turned, clean-leather-strapped contraption is, after all, no better--even perhaps worse--than an ordinary human foot. She will--she must!--elicit the truth somehow. "Daddy!" "Lassie!" "When you was out on the yard-arm, and the wind was a-freshenin' up from the south...." "To be sure, lass! Freshening to a three-quarter gale, and none too little canvas on her.... Easy ahead, lassie!" Jim is only helping the memory of the well-worn story, and the child accepts the prompting. "... None too little canvas on her. And Peter Cortright and Marmaduke Flyn, they was both on the mainyard reefin' alongside. And Peter Cortright he sings out to look...." "Ah!--and your Daddy, he looked, and there he see her, the Dutchman, carrying all sail afore the wind.... Well, little lass, and what o' that?" "When you was then, 'sposin' you'd only had a wooden leg!" Jim's big laugh comes; and so lost is he in his little lass, so free from all thought of his own great privation, even in the face of the bygone time, that he can make it a heart-whole laugh and never flinch. "'Sposin' I'd only had a wooden leg? Well--as I reckon it--I shouldn't have taken much notice. Not for one such! If you'd 'a named two wooden legs now, lassie! That might have constitooted a poor kind of holt on a slippery yard. But I might have made a shift to do, even at that." Lizarann was silenced, but not convinced. She resolved to thresh the subject out with Bridgetticks, whom she had secretly resolved to call upon on her way home. Bridget might know nothing about wooden legs, but she could cite a parallel experience, having herself walked on her brother's stelts, what he made out of two broomsticks and the foot'old nyled on, and mide syfe with a scrop of narrer iron hooping. She would refer it to Bridgetticks whether her brother--or a Circus, for that matter--could walk upon a bare yard, of which her own image was akin to a yard-measure, with a pair of stelts. If she, Bridget, felt confident of her brother's powers, no doubt Jim's assurance of his own might have been well grounded. "Doesn't Aunt Stingy come to see to you, Daddy?" she asked anxiously. For she couldn't see no sign neither of breakfast, nor yet of dinner, nor yet of supper.