against it, yielding
to every movement of the ship, get on with his cooking like someone safe
ashore. Still more strange was it to see him in the heaviest of weather
cross the deck. He had a line or two rigged up to help him across the
widest spaces--Long John's earrings, they were called; and he would hand
himself from one place to another, now using the crutch, now trailing it
alongside by the lanyard, as quickly as another man could walk. Yet some
of the men who had sailed with him before expressed their pity to see
him so reduced.

"He's no common man, Barbecue," said the coxswain to me. "He had good
schooling in his young days and can speak like a book when so minded;
and brave--a lion's nothing alongside of Long John! I seen him grapple
four and knock their heads together--him unarmed."

All the crew respected and even obeyed him. He had a way of talking
to each and doing everybody some particular service. To me he was
unweariedly kind, and always glad to see me in the galley, which he kept
as clean as a new pin, the dishes hanging up burnished and his parrot in
a cage in one corner.

"Come away, Hawkins," he would say; "come and have a yarn with John.
Nobody more welcome than yourself, my son. Sit you down and hear the
news. Here's Cap'n Flint--I calls my parrot Cap'n Flint, after the
famous buccaneer--here's Cap'n Flint predicting success to our v'yage.
Wasn't you, cap'n?"

And the parrot would say, with great rapidity, "Pieces of eight! Pieces
of eight! Pieces of eight!" till you wondered that it was not out of
breath, or till John threw his handkerchief over the cage.

"Now, that bird," he would say, "is, maybe, two hundred years
old, Hawkins--they live forever mostly; and if anybody's seen more
wickedness, it must be the devil himself. She's sailed with England,
the great Cap'n England, the pirate. She's been at Madagascar, and at
Malabar, and Surinam, and Providence, and Portobello. She was at the
fishing up of the wrecked plate ships. It's there she learned 'Pieces
of eight,' and little wonder; three hundred and fifty thousand of 'em,
Hawkins! She was at the boarding of the viceroy of the Indies out of
Goa, she was; and to look at her you would think she was a babby. But
you smelt powder--didn't you, cap'n?"

"Stand by to go about," the parrot would scream.

"Ah, she's a handsome craft, she is," the cook would say, and give her
sugar from his pocket, and then the bird would peck at the bars and
swe