Page:Doctor Syn - A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh.djvu/174

 when I was in a regular blinder, why, I solemnly believes he was scared froze o' me. There was only one man my superior in all the time I sailed them golden seas, and that man was Clegg hisself. I served on his ship, you know, Jerk. I was carpenter, master carpenter, mind you, to Clegg hisself—to no less a man than Clegg. And on Clegg's own ship it were, too. She was called the Imogene. I never knew why she was called so. It sounds a high fiddaddley sort o' name for a pirate ship, but then Clegg was a regular gentleman in his tastes. Why, I remember him sittin' so peaceful on the roundhouse roof one day a-readin' of Virgil—and not in the vulgar tongue, neither. He was a-readin' it in the foreign language wot it was first wrote in, so he told me. And you couldn't somehow get hold o' the fact that that benign-lookin' cove wot was sittin' there so peaceful a-readin' learned books had maybe half an hour before strung up a mutineer to the yardarms or made some wealthy fat merchant walk the dirty plank. No, he was a rummun, and no mistake, was that damned old pirate Clegg. But I'd pull my forelock, supposing I had one, all day long to old Clegg, even were I the Archbishop of Canterbury and he only an out-at-heel seadog. Now with England it was different, as I told you, though I'll own he could beat the devil hisself for blasphemy when he was put out. But I wasn't afraid o' him; he was one you could size up like. But Clegg—oh, he was different.