"
This proposal drew all eyes towards the skipper, who was still leaning
against his tiller, smoking for life or death. I was not favourably
received, extorting a grunt in reply, that any one could understand
denoted dissent. The pipe was slowly removed, and the private opinion
of this personage was pretty openly expressed, in his Dutchified
dialect.
"If a body coult get a wint for der askin', dis might do very well,"
he said; "but nobody rounts-to mit a fair wind."
I have always remarked that they who have used a dialect different
from the common forms of speech in their youth, and come afterwards to
correct it, by intercourse with the world, usually fall back into
their early infirmities in moments of trial, perplexity, or
anger. This is easily explained. Habit has become a sort of nature, in
their childhood, and it is when most tried that we are the most
natural. Then, this skipper, an Albany--or Al_bon_ny man, as he
would probably have styled himself, had got down the river as far as
Sing-Sing, and had acquired a tolerable English; but, being now
disturbed, he fell back upon his original mode of speaking, the
certain proof that he would never give in. I saw at once the
hopelessness of attempting to persuade one of his school, and had
begun to devise some other scheme for getting the box on board, when
to my surprise, and not a little to my concern, I saw Andrew Drewett,
first taking the box from his mother, step upon the end of our
main-boom, and move along the spar with the evident intention to walk
as far as our deck and deliver Lucy her property with his own
hands.
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