To Captain Fuzzy I said no more. If he could not see the advantage of attending to his own business, but must needs go out of his way to administer public reproof to me, I could only be sorry for him. To Ikey, however, I put some questions of a general tendency; but from his barbarous broken English--if this jargon could be called English at all--the only thing I could gather was, that none but true Devonshire folk had a right to ask about Devonshire families. This might be true to a certain extent, though I never have seen such a law laid down. The answer, however, is perfectly simple. If these people carry on in a manner that cannot fail to draw public attention, they attack us at once on our tenderest point, and tenfold so if they are our betters; for what man of common-sense could admit the idea of anybody setting up to be nobody? Therefore I felt myself quite ready to give a week's pay and victuals, in that state of life to which God alone could have seen fit to call me--as mate of that Devonshire ketch, or hoy, or tub, or whatever it might be--four shillings and a bag of suet-dumplings, twice a-day, I would have given, to understand upon the spot all about that elderly gentleman. It helped me very little, indeed, that I kept on saying to myself, "This matters not; 'tis a few hours only. The moment we get to Barnstaple, I shall find some women;--the women can never help telling everything, and for the most part ten times that. Only contradict them bravely, and they have no silence left." However, it helped me not a little when Captain Fuzzy, with a duck of his head, tumbled up from the cuddy, brimful, as we saw, of the dinner-time. A man of my experience, who has lived for six weeks on the horns of sea-snails, which the officers found too hard for them, that time we were wrecked in the Palamede--what can a man of this kind feel when a trumpery coaster dares to pipe all hands to dinner?