n Jorrocks, who was standing by. "This is the
fust time I ever heard tell of a mule having toes!"

"Well, hooves thin, if you likes them betther," said Pat, a little upset
by this correction. "But, as I was a sayin' when this omahdaun here
took the word out ov me mouth, unlike the raal gintleman he ginerally
is--"

"Stow that flummery," cried Jorrocks, putting his hands before his face,
under pretence of blushing at the compliment; but Doolan took no notice
of him further, proceeding with his yarn.

"Whin we hove them mules over the side, I noticed one as was coollured
most peculiar, all sthripes ov black on a white skin, jist like one ov
them zaybrays they haves in the sarcus show, an' they're called so, by
the same token, 'case they brays like a donkey and comes over the zay,
you see?"

"Aye, we see," said the hands, winking at each other and whispering that
Pat was "carrying on finely this morning!"

"Well, bhoys, as I was a sayin'," continued the narrator, serving out
pannikins of hot coffee to the watch the while, and so attending to duty
and pleasure in the same breath, "I notic't this sthripy mule when it
was chucked over the side at the beginning of the month. It was last
August twelvemonth as how we was crossing the Line; and, after pitching
the poor brute over, we sailed on and on--would you belayve it?--aye,
for thray weeks longer, as I'm a living sinner, whin one foine mornin',
jist the same as this now, the look-out man sings out as he says a boat
floating ahid ov the schooner! Our old man, thinkin' there might be
sowls in the blissid thing, puts the vessel off ov her coorse to fetch
to windward ov it; and blest if what the look-out man thought was a boat
wasn't the self-same carkiss ov that there sthripy mule we hove over
three weeks before!"

"You'll do," was the comment of Jorrocks to this story. "You 'mind me,
Pat, of a yarn I heard once about an old lady and a chap who knew how to
`bowse his jib up,' same as yourself."

"What was that?" I asked, seeing that Jorrocks looked as if he were
primed up to fire off another story, and only needed a little pressing
to make him reel it out.

"Lord, Mister Leigh, it ain't nothing to speak of," he began, with a
preliminary hitch of his trowser stocks; "it's only what them book-
people calls a nanny goat."

"An anecdote, eh?" I said. "Well, that'll be all the better. Heave
ahead with it now you're on the tack."

"All right, then," replied Jorr