‘Well, we gets up early and we turns in early,’ answered Daly, ‘and what’s between somehow seems to slide out unbeknown. We turns a day up as you turns a sandglass up, and the stuff runs so fast and sly that it always seems to be time to go to bed or time to be getting up.’ ‘It vhas eighteen hoondred and twenty-four dot Corporal Glass vhas governor,’ said Peter Green. ‘Dot vhas joost fourteen years; und a leetle while ago, when we keep his birthday, he vhas saying it vhas all der same as fourteen days, so queek vhas time.’ ‘Any of you left lately?’ said Mr. Bates. ‘Two men took on home-sick last year,’ answered Hagan. ‘How’s the school getting on?’ inquired Tom. ‘Foorst class,’ answered Green. ‘But I tell you vhat ve wants. Ve want more young men. Dere vhas too many fimmen.’ ‘Too many of either will eat you up!’ exclaimed Tom. ‘When I was last here, Glass told me that the island could never be got to support more than two hundred people.’ ‘Vell, dot vhas right.’ ‘Will the corporal be able to come aboard? I want to see him.’ ‘Not to-day, I expect,’ said the grey-haired old man-of-war’s man named Daly. ‘That there lip of his is a-worriting him. We’ll put ye ashore, capt’n. The governor’ll be glad to welcome ye.’ ‘We’re well off for potatoes,’ said Hagan, ‘and there are a few stones of prime beef at your sarvice. Goats grow scarce. Water-casks want filling?’ ‘Why, perhaps. I must see to it,’ said Tom. ‘Vhat might der be in your holdt to barter mit?’ asked Peter Green. ‘Much that’ll prove useful to the island,’ said Tom; ‘and that’s one of the matters I wish to see Governor Glass about.’ ‘Come ashore with us, capt’n,’ said the Dutchman. ‘I can’t leave the brig,’ answered Tom. ‘We’re short-handed.’ ‘So! I vash vondering where der crew vhas.’ ‘Gone dead?’ inquired Hagan. ‘No. They took the boat and ran from the brig in mid-ocean. There were five of them and a cook. The beauties left a note behind them to let us know what had become of them, that we shouldn’t feel uneasy. Mr. Peter Green, your British merchant seaman slowly and steadily improves, morally and intellectually. He has hauled down his bloody flag and chucked his blunderbuss to the mermaids, and now ships as a respectable man under a house flag and is rarely guilty of worse crimes than swearing away his captain’s liberty and life, or slitting a windpipe in the middle watch and making off in the ship’s quarter-boat.’ ‘I do not exactly understand you, sir,’ said Peter Green, who had sat straining his withered, good-natured Dutch face to catch Tom’s meaning, his few black fangs of teeth slowly masticating the while, as though he chewed the cud. ‘There ha’n’t been no blood shed, I hope?’ said the old fellow Cotton.