been the same with the other Scotsmen present, for we all laughed our
fill.

Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones. It would be
difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he mine, during
the voyage. Thus at table I carved, while he only scooped gravy; but at
our concerts, of which more anon, he was the president who called up
performers to sing, and I but his messenger who ran his errands and
pleaded privately with the over-modest. I knew I liked Mr. Jones from
the moment I saw him. I thought him by his face to be Scottish; nor
could his accent undeceive me. For as there is a _lingua franca_ of many
tongues on the moles and in the feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there
is a free or common accent among English-speaking men who follow the
sea. They catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper,
even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an _h_; a word of a dialect is
picked up from another hand in the forecastle; until often the result is
undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of birth. So it
was with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been long to sea;
and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his life a blacksmith at
an inland forge; a few years in America and half a score of ocean
voyages having sufficed to modify his speech into the common pattern. By
his own account he was both strong and skilful in his trade. A few years
back, he had been married and after a fashion a rich man; now the wife
was dead and the money gone. But his was the nature that looks forward,
and goes on from one year to another and through all the extremities of
fortune undismayed; and if the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look
to see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting
things to rights. He was always hovering round inventions like a bee
over a flower, and lived in a dream of patents. He had with him a patent
medicine, for instance, the composition of which he had bought years ago
for five dollars from an American pedlar, and sold the other day for a
hundred pounds (I think it was) to an English apothecary. It was called
Golden Oil; cured all maladies without exception; and I am bound to say
that I partook of it myself with good results. It is a character of the
man that he was not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but
wherever there was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be Jones
with his bottle.

If he had one