“My mind is pretty much like a ship that is about to slip off its ways,” resumed Fid. “If she makes a fair start, and there is neither jam nor dry-rub, smack see goes into the water, like a sail let run in a calm; but, if she once brings up, a good deal of labour is to be gone through to set her in motion again. Now, in order to wedge up my ideas, and to get the story slushed, so that I can slip through it with ease, it is needful to overrun the part which I have just let go; which is, how my father was a fisherman, and how I doubled the Horn—Ah! here I have it again, clear of kinks, fake above fake, like a well-coiled cable; so that I can pay it out as easily as the boatswain’s yeoman can lay his hand on a bit of ratling stuff. Well, I doubled the Horn, as I was saying, and might have been the matter of four years cruising about among the islands and seas of those parts, which were none of the best known then, or for that matter, now. After this, I served in his Majesty’s fleet a whole war, and got as much honour as I could stow beneath hatches. Well, then, I fell in with the Guinea—the black, my Lady, that you see turning in a new clue-garnet-block for the starboard clue of the fore-course.” “Ay; then you fell in with the African,” said the Rover. “Then we made our acquaintance; and, although his colour is no whiter than the back of a whale, I care not who knows it, after master Harry, there is no man living who has an honester way with him, or in whose company I take greater satisfaction. To be sure, your Honour, the fellow is something contradictory and has a great opinion of his strength and thinks his equal is not to be found at a weather-earing or in the bunt of a topsail; but then he is no better than a black, and one is not to be too particular in looking into the faults of such as are not actually his fellow creatures.” “No, no; that would be uncharitable in the extreme.” “The very words the chaplain used to let fly aboard the ‘Brunswick!’ It is a great thing to have schooling, your Honour; since, if it does nothing else, it fits a man for a boatswain, and puts him in the track of steering the shortest course to heaven. But, as I was saying, there was I and Guinea shipmates and in a reasonable way friends, for five years more; and then the time arrived when we met with the mishap of the wreck in the West-Indies.” “What wreck?” demanded his officer. “I beg your Honour’s pardon; I never swing my head-yards till I’m sure the ship won’t luff back into the wind; and, before I tell the particulars of the wreck, I will overrun my ideas, to see that nothing is forgotten that should of right be first mentioned.”