Chapter 2 - Page 2

old man
had been an ill-mannered old dog, followed the relation from time to
time with a sneering remark, which in her eagerness she didn't notice,
or didn't understand. But when he had finished what he had to do, he
gave vent to his feelings in a way she did understand,--he laughed
incredulously.

"Old Jacob there on board the Naiad! This is the first time anybody ever
heard of it."

The individual in question unfortunately came out at the moment to see
the boat off, and turning, to him, red with anger, she cried--

"Grandfather! he doesn't believe you were on board the Naiad that time!"

The old man answered at first as if he didn't deign to enter upon any
controversy on the subject--

"Oh, I suppose it's only little girls' prattle again."

But whether it was wounded vanity, or a sudden access of irritation
against the lad, or that his eye fell upon his granddaughter standing
there, so evidently incensed and resentful, he flared up the next
moment, and thrusting his huge fist under the youngster's nose, burst
out--

"If you want to know all about it, you young swabber, I may tell you I
stood on the Naiad's gun-deck with better folk than _you_ are ever
likely to come across"--he stamped his foot here as if he had the deck
under him--"when, with one broadside from the Dictator, the three masts
and bowsprit were shot away, and the main deck came crashing down upon
the lower;"--the last sentence was taken from 'Exploits of Danish and
Norwegian Naval Heroes,' and the old man was as proud of these lines as
he would have been of a medal.

"When the crash came," he pursued, always in the same posture, and in
the manner of the sacred text, "he who stands here and tells the tale
had but just time to save himself by leaping into the sea through a
gun-port."

But he threw off then the trammels of the text, and continued _in
propriâ personâ_, violently gesticulating with his fists, and steadily
advancing all the time, while Salvé prudently retreated before his
advance down to the boat.

"We don't deal in lies and fabricate stories out here like you, you
young whipper-snapper of a ship's cub; and if it wasn't for your father,
who has sense enough to rope's-end you himself, I'd lay a stick across
your back till you hadn't a howl left in you."

With this finale of the longest speech to which he had given vent for
thirty years perhaps, he turned with a short nod to the father, and went
into the house again.

Elizabeth was miserable that Salvé should go away like this, without so
much as deigning to say good-bye to her. And her grandfather was cross