talk like an Englishman; and he done it pretty well, too, for a slouch.
I can't imitate him, and so I ain't a-going to try to; but he really done
it pretty good. Then he says:

"How are you on the deef and dumb, Bilgewater?"

The duke said, leave him alone for that; said he had played a deef and
dumb person on the histronic boards. So then they waited for a
steamboat.

About the middle of the afternoon a couple of little boats come along,
but they didn't come from high enough up the river; but at last there was
a big one, and they hailed her. She sent out her yawl, and we went
aboard, and she was from Cincinnati; and when they found we only wanted
to go four or five mile they was booming mad, and gave us a cussing, and
said they wouldn't land us. But the king was ca'm. He says:

"If gentlemen kin afford to pay a dollar a mile apiece to be took on and
put off in a yawl, a steamboat kin afford to carry 'em, can't it?"

So they softened down and said it was all right; and when we got to the
village they yawled us ashore. About two dozen men flocked down when
they see the yawl a-coming, and when the king says:

"Kin any of you gentlemen tell me wher' Mr. Peter Wilks lives?" they give
a glance at one another, and nodded their heads, as much as to say, "What
d' I tell you?" Then one of them says, kind of soft and gentle:

"I'm sorry sir, but the best we can do is to tell you where he DID live
yesterday evening."

Sudden as winking the ornery old cretur went an to smash, and fell up
against the man, and put his chin on his shoulder, and cried down his
back, and says:

"Alas, alas, our poor brother--gone, and we never got to see him; oh,
it's too, too hard!"

Then he turns around, blubbering, and makes a lot of idiotic signs to the
duke on his hands, and blamed if he didn't drop a carpet-bag and bust out
a-crying. If they warn't the beatenest lot, them two frauds, that ever I
struck.

Well, the men gathered around and sympathized with them, and said all
sorts of kind things to them, and carried their carpet-bags up the hill
for them, and let them lean on them and cry, and told the king all about
his brother's last moments, and the king he told it all over again on his
hands to the duke, and both of them took on about that dead tanner like
they'd lost the twelve disciples. Well, if ever I struck anything like
it, I'm a nigger. It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.

CHAPTER XXV.