Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/192

 peppermint lozenge round his tongue, just as a real seaman turns a quid; "now look at the 'Sea-sarpent' lying away to the eastward yonder, just beyond the point where the gravel's been washed adrift. She's fifty-two, she is, but I wouldn't trust her, not in lumpy water, you know, like the schooner. No. If I was a building of one now, what I call, for all work and all weathers, thirty would be my mark, or from that to thirty-five at the outside!"

"Thirty-five what? Tons?" you ask, a little abashed, and feeling you have committed yourself.

"Tons!" he repeats, in a tone of intense dissrust—"tons be blowed! h'inches! I should have thought any landsman might ha' knowed that—h'inches!" and lurching sulkily into his cabin under the willow-tree, disappears to be seen no more.

Later, when September has begun to