Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/194

 sign-board, creaking and swinging in the breeze now freshening with an incoming tide. Its representation of a fox playing the fiddle was familiar to seafaring men as indicating a favourite house of call for the consumption of beer, tobacco, and that seductive compound known to several generations by the popular name of punch.

The cheerful fire, the red curtains, the sanded floor, the wooden chairs, and liberal measures of their jovial haunt, had been present to the mind's eye of many an honest tar clinging wet and cold to a slippery yard, reefing topsails in a nor'-wester, or eating maggoty biscuit and sipping six-*water grog, on half rations, homeward bound with a head-*wind, but probably none of them had ever speculated on the origin of the sign they knew so well and thought of so often. Why a fox and fiddle should be found together in a seaport town, what a fox had to do with a fiddle, or, however appropriate to their ideas of jollity the instrument might appear, wherefore its player should be represented as the cunning animal whom destiny had already condemned to be hunted by English country gentlemen, was a speculation on which they had no wish to embark. Neither have I. It is enough to know that the Fox and Fiddle sold loaded beer, strong tobacco, and scalding punch, to an extent not even limited by the consumer's purse; for when Jack had spent all his rhino, the landlord's liberality enabled him to run up a score, hereafter to be liquidated from the wages of a future voyage. The infatuated debtor, paying something like two hundred per cent. on every mouthful for this accommodation, by a farther arrangement, that he should engage with any skipper of the landlord's providing, literally sold himself, body and soul, for a nipperkin of rum and half-a-pound of tobacco.

Nevertheless, several score of the boldest hearts and readiest hands in England were to be bought at this low price, and Butter-faced Bob, as his rough-spoken customers called the owner of the Fox and Fiddle, would furnish as many of them at a reasonable tariff, merchant and man-of-war's men, as the captain wanted or the owners could afford to buy. It was no wonder his children had strong lungs, and round, well-fed cheeks.

"That's a good chap!" observed a deep hoarse voice,