surprising. His conversation had,
indeed, quite a nautical flavor at times, and on one occasion he raised
a shout of laughter in a group of ladies and gentlemen who were sitting
on deck, wrapped in shawls and overcoats, by saying sweetly, and with a
very engaging expression:

"Shiver my timbers, but it's a cold day!"

It surprised him when they laughed. He had picked up this sea-faring
remark from an "elderly naval man" of the name of Jerry, who told him
stories in which it occurred frequently. To judge from his stories of
his own adventures, Jerry had made some two or three thousand voyages,
and had been invariably shipwrecked on each occasion on an island
densely populated with bloodthirsty cannibals. Judging, also, by these
same exciting adventures, he had been partially roasted and eaten
frequently and had been scalped some fifteen or twenty times.

"That is why he is so bald," explained Lord Fauntleroy to his mamma.
"After you have been scalped several times the hair never grows again.
Jerry's never grew again after that last time, when the King of the
Parromachaweekins did it with the knife made out of the skull of the
Chief of the Wopslemumpkies. He says it was one of the most serious
times he ever had. He was so frightened that his hair stood right
straight up when the king flourished his knife, and it never would lie
down, and the king wears it that way now, and it looks something like a
hair-brush. I never heard anything like the asperiences Jerry has had! I
should so like to tell Mr. Hobbs about them!"

Sometimes, when the weather was very disagreeable and people were
kept below decks in the saloon, a party of his grown-up friends would
persuade him to tell them some of these "asperiences" of Jerry's, and as
he sat relating them with great delight and fervor, there was certainly
no more popular voyager on any ocean steamer crossing the Atlantic than
little Lord Fauntleroy. He was always innocently and good-naturedly
ready to do his small best to add to the general entertainment, and
there was a charm in the very unconsciousness of his own childish
importance.

"Jerry's stories int'rust them very much," he said to his mamma. "For my
part--you must excuse me, Dearest--but sometimes I should have thought
they couldn't be all quite true, if they hadn't happened to Jerry
himself; but as they all happened to Jerry--well, it's very strange, you
know, and perhaps sometimes he may forget and be a little mistaken