d acrost his park no more'n I did, but I never said nothin'. No
more he didn't say nothin' about my blue-brick stables, which was really
the best an' honestest piece o' work I'd done in quite a while. He
give me ten pounds for savin' him a hem of a deal o' trouble at home. I
reckon things are pretty much alike, all times, in all places.'

Hal and he laughed together. Dan couldn't quite understand what they
thought so funny, and went on with his work for some time without
speaking.

When he looked up, Mr Springett, alone, was wiping his eyes with his
green-and-yellow pocket-handkerchief.

'Bless me, Mus' Dan, I've been asleep,' he said. 'An' I've dreamed a
dream which has made me laugh--laugh as I ain't laughed in a long day.
I can't remember what 'twas all about, but they do say that when old
men take to laughin' in their sleep, they're middlin' ripe for the next
world. Have you been workin' honest, Mus' Dan?'

'Ra-ather,' said Dan, unclamping the schooner from the vice. 'And look
how I've cut myself with the small gouge.'

'Ye-es. You want a lump o' cobwebs to that,' said Mr Springett. 'Oh, I
see you've put it on already. That's right, Mus' Dan.'

King Henry VII and the Shipwrights

Harry our King in England from London town is gone,
And comen to Hamull on the Hoke in the countie of Suthampton.
For there lay the MARY OF THE TOWER, his ship of war so strong,
And he would discover, certaynely, if his shipwrights did him wrong.

He told not none of his setting forth, nor yet where he would go
(But only my Lord of Arundel), and meanly did he show,
In an old jerkin and patched hose that no man might him mark;
With his frieze hood and cloak about, he looked like any clerk.
He was at Hamull on the Hoke about the hour of the tide,
And saw the MARY haled into dock, the winter to abide,
With all her tackle and habiliments which are the King his own;
But then ran on his false shipwrights and stripped her to the bone.

They heaved the main-mast overboard, that was of a trusty tree,
And they wrote down it was spent and lost by force of weather at sea.
But they sawen it into planks and strakes as far as it might go,
To maken beds for their own wives and little children also.

There was a knave called Slingawai, he crope beneath the deck,
Crying: 'Good felawes, come and see! The ship is nigh a wreck!
For the storm that took our tall main-mast, it blew so fierce and fell,
Alac