“Well, your honor understands; I never spake so much before since ever I pass my coorting-time. We boiled down the pigtail to a pint of tidy soup, and strained it as bright as sturgeon juice; then we got a bottle with 'Navy Supply' on a bull's-eye in the belly of it; and we filled it with the French white brandy, and the pigtail soup, and a noggin of molasses, and shook it all up well together; and a better contract-rum, your honor, never come into high admiral's stores.” “But, Joseph, good Joseph,” cried Mr. Mordacks, “do forge ahead a little faster. Your private feelings, and the manufacture of them, are highly interesting to you; but I only want to know what came of it.” “Your honor is like a child hearing of a story; you wants the end first, and the middle of it after; but I bowls along with a hitch and a squirt, from habit of fo'castle: and the more you crosses hawse, the wider I shall head about, or down helm and bear off, mayhap. I can hear my Bob a-singing: what a voice he hath! They tell me it cometh from the timber of his leg; the same as a old Cremony. He tuned up a many times in yonder old barge, and shook the brown water, like a frigate's wake. He would just make our fortin in the Minister, they said, with Black-eyed Susan and Tom Bowline.” “Truly, he has a magnificent voice: what power, what compass, what a rich clear tone! In spite of the fog I will have the window up.” Geoffrey Mordacks loved good singing, the grandest of all melody, and, impatient as he was, he forgot all hurry; while the river, and the buildings, and the arches of the bridge, were ringing, and echoing, and sweetly embosoming the mellow delivery of the one-legged tar. And old Joe was highly pleased, although he would not show it, at such an effect upon a man so hard and dry. “Now, your honor, it is overbad of you,” he continued, with a softening grin, “to hasten me so, and then to hear me out o' window, because Bob hath a sweeter pipe. Ah, he can whistle like a blackbird, too, and gain a lot of money; but there, what good? He sacrifices it all to the honor of his heart, first maggot that cometh into it; and he done the very same with Rickon Goold, the Methody galley-raker. We never was so softy when I were afloat. But your honor shall hear, and give judgment for yourself.