Chapter 7 - Page 2

was so designated.
Will you have the good-nature to explain yourself?"

"I'm a native of Stunin'tun, in the State of Connecticut, in old New
England. My parents being dead, I was sent to sea a four-year-old,
and here I am, walking about the kingdom of France without a cent in
my pocket, a shipwrecked mariner. Hard as my lot is, to say the
truth, I'd about as leave starve as live by speaking their d--d
lingo."

"Shipwrecked--a mariner--starving--and a Yankee!"

"All that, and maybe more, too; though, by your leave, commodore,
we'll drop the last title. I'm proud enough to call myself a Yankee,
but my back is apt to get up when I hear an Englishman use the word.
We are yet friends, and it may be well enough to continue so until
some good comes of it to one or other of the parties."

"I ask your pardon, Mr. Poke, and will not offend again. Have you
circumnavigated the globe?"

Captain Poke snapped his fingers, in pure contempt of the simplicity
of the question.

"Has the moon ever sailed round the 'arth! Look here, a moment,
commodore"--he took from his pocket an apple, of which he had been
munching half a-dozen during the walk, and held it up to view--"draw
your lines which way you will on this sphere; crosswise or
lengthwise, up or down, zigzag or parpendic'lar, and you will not
find more traverses than I've worked about the old ball!"

"By land as well as by sea?"

"Why, as to the land, I've had my share of that, too; for it has
been my hard fortune to run upon it, when a softer bed would have
given a more quiet nap. This is just the present difficulty with me,
for I am now tacking about among these Frenchmen in order to get
afloat again, like an alligator floundering in the mud. I lost my
schooner on the northeast coast of Russia--somewhere hereabouts,"
pointing to the precise spot on the apple; "we were up there trading
in skins-and finding no means of reaching home by the road I'd come,
and smelling salt water down hereaway, I've been shaping my course
westward for the last eighteen months, steering as near as might be
directly athwart Europe and Asia; and here I am at last within two
days' run of Havre, which is, if I can get good Yankee planks
beneath me once more, within some eighteen or twenty days' run of
home."

"You allow me, then, to call the planks Yankee?"

"Call 'em what you please, commodore; though I should prefar to call
'em the 'Debby and Dolly of Stunin'tun,' to anything else, for that
was the name of the craft I lost. Well, the best of us are but
frail, and the longest-winded man is no dolphin to swim with his
head under