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Rh wisdom of books but an infinitely wiser lore. For Spanish Dick with his mixture of Spanish, Portugee, Italian, and who knows what Romance and even Romany bloods, was only in part a sailor. A goodly slice of him was gypsy and troubadour—but he was wholly an irresponsible love-child of the sea. He could cook fairly, and reef a sail in a storm with some dispatch. But while he performed the duties before the mast with perhaps only sufficient skill to escape being thrown overboard, in other arts he reached an almost miraculous perfection. He could curse as ingeniously as Old Man Veldmann, but with infinitely less of offence and more of music; spin a smacking good yarn; dance divinely; sing like an angel all the sailors chanteys that ever were written; yes, and very quickly lull to sleep a restless child. Sally's still have this in their memories.

Even now he was sharing his repast with a little yellow dog who, between whiles, was boring for fleas, thumping his sausage of a tail on the sands, and looking up at his master with eyes quite as soft and almost of the same liquid brown.

"Señor Alfonso," the man was saying to his yellow companion, as he tossed him a bit of the cheese, "we always go feefty-feefty, non?"

Now his language was a linguistic Joseph's coat of many and quaint colours, a wonderful mosaic of grammatical and ungrammatical expressions from the Seven Seas, in which, as in his veins, no one could tell what strain predominated, no more than they could swear who was his mother, or where his father or grandfathers came from. But the dog seemed