But mind one thing, sir, that you keep
her, when you've got her. She hath too many furriner natives aboard of
her, to be any way to my liking."
"Oh, there need be no doubt about them," replied Blyth; "we treat them
like ourselves, and they are all upon their honour, which no Frenchman
ever thinks of breaking. But my men will be tired of waiting for me. I
shall leave you to your plans, Tugwell."
"Ah, I know the natur' of they young men," Captain Zebedee mused, as he
sate in his hollow, till Scudamore's boat was far away; "they be full
of scruples for themselves and faith in other fellows. He'll never tell
Squire, nor no one else here, what I laid him under, and the laugh would
go again' him, if he did. We shall get to-day's money, I reckon, as well
as double pay to-morrow, and airn it. Well, it might 'a been better, and
it might be wuss."
About two miles westward of the brook, some rocks marked the end of the
fine Springhaven sands and the beginning of a far more rugged beach, the
shingles and flint shelves of Pebbleridge. Here the chalk of the Sussex
backbone (which has been plumped over and sleeked by the flesh of the
valley) juts forth, like the scrags of a skeleton, and crumbles in low
but rugged cliffs into the flat domain of sea. Here the landing is bad,
and the anchorage worse, for a slippery shale rejects the fluke, and the
water is usually kept in a fidget between the orders of the west wind
and scurry of the tide.
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