talking about baby Nie,” replied the captain, still addressing the tobacco. “I wonder, now, what would have become of him, though, if it hadn’t been for old Bo’swain Roberts. Why, he would have died. Died? Ay, but I wouldn’t see poor Sergeant Radnor’s baby thrown to the sharks, not for all the world. Fed him first on hen’s milk (the name given by sailors to egg beaten up in water). Didn’t do well on that. ‘Cap’n,’ says I to the skipper one day, ‘soon’s we go to Zanzibar we must get a nanny-goat for the young papoose, else he’ll lose the number of his mess, and the doctor will have to mark him D.D.’ (discharged dead.) ‘Very well, Roberts,’ says the skipper, ‘that’s just as you like.’
“Now our purser was a mean old fellow. ‘Nanny-goat!’ he cries, when I went to ask him for the money. ‘What next, I wonder? the service is going to the deuce. No, Her Majesty pays for no nanny-goats, I do assure ye.’
“I just touches my hat and marches off to our dear old doctor. I knew he had a kindly heart. ‘Nanny-goat,’ cries he, ‘why, of course the darling baby’ll have a nanny-goat. We’ll keep it out of the sick-mess fund, and mark it down medical comforts.’1 ‘Excuse me, sir,’ said I, catching hold of the doctor’s hand – it was as rough as my own – ‘but you’re a brick.’
“And that, ‘Nie,’ is how you came for the first five years o’ your life to be called nothing else but young ‘medical comforts.’”
“Five years!” I said, “that is a long spell for a ship to be on one station.”
“Ay, lad, you’re right. But ships were ships in those days.
“Young ‘medical comforts’,” he continued, “as they called you, in less than four years was a deal smarter than any monkey on board. Not that he could climb quite so high, maybe, but he was more tricky, and that is saying a lot. And it was among the monkeys that ‘medical comforts’ would mostly be, too.
“But the monkeys all seemed to like you, Nie; they would tease each other, and fight each other, but they never touched you. There was one animal in particular, and he was your favourite, the queerest old chap you ever saw. We got him down in Madagascar, and they called him the Ay-ay. Doctor always said he was a being from another world, a kind of a spirit, and the men used to be afraid of him. He had hands like a human being, but the middle finger was much longer than the others, and not thicker than a straw. When only a baby, he used to dip this long skinny finger in milk and give you to suck, and when you went to sleep he never left your side. Sometimes he would stroke your face and say, ‘Ay-ay’ as tenderly as if he’d been a mother to you. But the men always declared it was ‘Nie, Nie,’ he’d be saying.
“But you had one pet on board that maybe you mind on – the Albatross?”
“I do,” said I, “young as I must have been at the time.”
“People say,” the captain went on, “they’ve never been tamed; but there he was, sure enough, in an immense great hencoop, that the doctor had made for him, and there you’d be in front of him often enough, though he would have cut the nose of anyone but yourself; and never a flying-fish was caught you didn’t get hold of, and take to him. The men got small share of these. But, bless you, Nie, you were the ship’s chief pet, and the men would have gone through fire and water for you any hour of the day or night.
“The jealousies there used to be about you, too, Nie! Why, lad, if it had been a young lady it couldn’t have been worse. Jealousies, Nie, ay, and more than jealousies, for our fellows didn’t need much to make them strip to the waist and fight. Fact is, when times were dull with us, I think they rather liked the excuse. I’ve heard a row got up for’ard just in the following fashion:
“You would be playing on Davis’s knee.
“‘Give us half an hour o’ the wee chap,’ Bill would say.
“‘Go along,’ Davis would reply, ‘you ’ad him all day yesterday.’
“‘He’s smilin’ to me,’ Bill would say.
“‘Smilin’ at you, you mean,’ Davis would answer derisively.
“‘Smilin’ at your ugly face. Why, that mouth o’ yours couldn’t be made any bigger ’athout shifting your ears back.’
“This would be enough.
“‘Come below,’ Bill would cry, ‘and I’ll see if a big ugly lubber like you is to cheek me!’
“‘Go with him, Davis!’ half a dozen would cry. ‘I’ll hold the youngster!’
“And there would be such a scramble to get you, that I used to wonder you weren’t torn to pieces. And all the while that animal with the long skinny middle finger would be jumping around like a demon and crying —
“‘Ay-ay! – Ay-ay! – Ay-ay!’
“As he never cried like this without all the monkeys following suit, and all the parrots whistling and shrieking – on occasions like these, Nie, there was five minutes of a rough ship, I can tell you.”
Chapter Four
“Still onward, fair the breeze nor rough the surge,
The blue waves sport around the stern they urge;
Far on the horizon’s verge appears a speck,
A spot – a mast – a sail – an armed deck.”
“Well, Ben,” I said, “life must have been very pleasant to me then.”
“And isn’t it now, Nie? isn’t it now, lad? Look at the beautiful old place that you have around you – all your own; you ought to be thankful. Listen to the birds on this delightful morning, their songs mingling with the cry o’ the wind through the poplars. And, lad, you cannot draw a breath out on the lawn here, without inhaling the odour of honey, and the perfume of flowers.”
“You are quite poetic, Ben Roberts,” I replied.
“Quite enough to make the barnacliest old tar that ever lived feel poetic, Nie,” quoth Ben.
“Well, fill your pipe again, Ben.”
“Ha! ha!” laughed the old man, “fill my pipe again, eh? That means heave round with another yarn, eh?”
“Something very like it,” I said.
“Well,” said the captain, “an old man is to be forgiven if he does get a little bit gossiping now and then, and wanders from his subject, and I always was fond of a bit o’ pretty scenery, Nie – pretty bits like the old mill by the riverside down yonder.”
“And a bit of fishing and shooting, Ben?”
“Ay, lad. But memory is at this moment taking me back to one of the loveliest bits o’ woodland landscape in the world. What a poem our Robbie Burns could have written there! You were still the Niobe’s pet, but old enough now to be left at times without your sea-dad. Away miles and miles into the wooded interior of Africa, we were a good long distance south the Line, and just sitting down, me and my mates, to a snack o’ lunch on the banks of a roaring tumbling brook, where we’d been bathing. We’d had a smartish week’s shooting, and were thinking of returning to the ship the very next day.
“Our guns were lying
Medical comforts are luxuries for the sick, bought at the surgeon’s discretion out of the sick-mess fund.
