ne 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 water!"

"Pray, Mr. Poke, permit me to ask where you learned to speak the English
language with so much purity?"

"Stunin'tun--I never had a mouthful of schooling but what I got at
home. It's all homespun. I make no boast of scholarship; but as for
navigating, or for finding my way about the 'arth, I'll turn my back
on no man, unless it be to leave him behind. Now we have people with us
that think a great deal of their geometry and astronomies, but I hold
to no such slender threads. My way is, when there is occasion to go
anywhere, to settle it well in my mind as to the place, and then to
make as straight a wake as natur' will allow, taking little account of
charts, which are as apt to put you wrong as right; and when they do get
you into a scrape it's a smasher! Depend on yourself and human natur',
is my rule; though I admit there is some accommodation in a compass,
particularly in cold weather."

"Cold weather! I do not well comprehend the distinction."

"Why, I rather conclude that one's scent gets to be dullish in a frost;
but this may be no more than a conceit after all, for the two times I've
been wrecked were in summer, and both the accidents happened by sheer
dint of hard blowing, and in broad daylight, when nothing human short of
a change of wind could have saved us."

"And you prefer this peculiar sort of nav