s theatrical, on which he prided himself on account of his
having appeared once behind the footlights in a theatre in Liverpool, as
a "super," I believe, and in a part where he had nothing to say!

"Quite so, Haldane; quite so," chuckled Spokeshave, as pleased as Punch
at the imaginary compliment. "_I do_ believe I could teach Irving a
thing or two if I had the mind to!"

"Yes, you donkey, if you _had_ the mind to," said I witheringly, by
giving an emphasis he did not mean to his own words. "`Very like a
whale,' as our old friend Polonius says in the play, the real _Hamlet_,
I mean, my boy, not your version of it. `Very like a whale,' indeed!"

"I'm sure, Mr Haldane," he answered loftily, cocking his long nose in
the air with a supercilious sniff, "I don't know what ye mean."

"And I've no time to waste telling you now," returned I.

At that moment we emerged on the open deck from under the back of the
poop, where we had been losing our time and talking nonsense; and,
looking towards the bridge forward, I saw Colonel Vereker, the very
person about whom we had been speaking, standing by the side of the
skipper.

"O, Lor', Spokeshave, what a crammer!" I cried. "You said not a moment
ago that Garry O'Neil was about to cut off the colonel's leg, while
there he is standing there, all right!"

"I didn't say he had cut it off yet," he retorted; "I said he was going
to cut it off. O'Neil told me so himself."

"Then," said I, "instead of cutting off the poor colonel's leg, he was
only `pulling your leg,' my joker!"

The cross-grained little beggar, however, did not seem to quite
understand the term I employed thus in joke, though it was used at sea
to express the fact of "taking a rise" out of any one, and a common
enough saying.

"I'm not the only fellow who tells crammers," he grimly muttered. "How
about that yarn of yours of the blessed `ghost-ship' you saw the other
night, I'd like to know. I believe, too, that the colonel, as you call
him, is only an impostor and that the skipper is going on just such a
wild-goose chase after this ship of his, which he says was captured by
pirates, as he did that Friday hunting your _Flying Dutchman_! wasting
our time with your idiotic story. Pirates and niggers, indeed! Why,
this chap, I'll bet, is a nigger himself, and more of a pirate than any
one we'll come across if we steam from here to the North Pole. Put that
in your pipe and smoke it, Dick Haldane; you and you