t took
a good deal of breaking. But now that I am an old, old man, I often
think over my pipe (I smoke at night instead of chewing) and my grog,
about pretty Lotje, with her fair hair curled up under a scalp of gilt
plating, and her great blue eyes,--of her plump white arms, and her trim
little feet, which she was all too fond, poor lass! of rigging up in
silk stockings and pumps. But I should never have a word to say against
kermesses, quotha! for I must, in time, have danced away some thousands
of dollars to the sound of a fiddle, and with a buxom jungvrauw for my
partner, in pretty nearly all the grog-shops at pretty nearly every port
on the map. For it was always my motto that when a man's heels feel
light he should forthwith begin to foot it in a hornpipe; and when he
feels thirsty, and has any rhino in his looker, he should pipe all hands
for grog. This, the wiseacres will tell me, is the way to ruin one's
health, and die poor; but I am very old, and if I had any riches I
couldn't take them away with me to Fiddler's Green, could I? Say!

My youngest sister, Barbet, was not pretty, but she was very kind, and
good, and quiet, and although she had been brought up in the very
strictest principles of Protestantism (that is to say, she used to get a
sound whipping, as all of us did, if she went to sleep in church or
forgot the text of the sermon), she took it into her head, when she grew
up, to turn Romanist, and became a nun. She went away to a convent at
Lille, in French Flanders (which, like Belgium, ought to belong to the
Dutch), and we heard no more of her--only once, many years ago--when,
for once in my life, I had made a little noise in the world by saving
some poor fellow from drowning in a shipwreck, which led to the Minister
of Marine sending me a gold medal and a purse full of guilders, and my
name being published in the printed logs--I mean the newspapers--my poor
sister Barbet (she had changed her name to Sister Veronica, I think, but
that is all ship-shape in a nunnery) sent me a beautiful letter, saying
that she always prayed for me, and enclosing me a pretty little image of
Sant Niklas, worked in coloured wools, on a bit of canvas. I was glad
to hear from my sister Barbet, and to hear that Oude Sant Niklas was a
Catholic as well as a Protestant saint (as a good ship, you see, is as
tight a craft under one flag as under another); and I wore the image,
and wear it now, next my heart, as a charm again