st drowning, instead of
the child's caul which I bought when I was young in High Street,
Wapping, England. It cost me ten pounds, but the dealer took it out
half in "swop;" that is to say, I gave him two pounds in silver, two
Spanish doubloons, a five-pound note, a green parrot, that swore quite
beautifully, a coral necklace, and a lot of uncut jewels, I picked up in
the Black Town at Calcutta, and that must have come to about the value
of ten pounds, I reckon.

[It would seem that the dealer in High Street, Wapping, got slightly the
better of honest Jan Daal in this transaction. But business is
business. Ed.]

You may wonder, when I have told you of the humble way of business in
which my father was, of the number of yunkers he had to keep, and all
out of the slender profits of a peddler's pack, and of the poor way we
lived, that we went to church, or to school, at all. But my dad was a
highly respectable man, who never drank more schnapps than was good for
him, except when he had the ague, which was about once every spring and
autumn, and once in the winter, with, perhaps, a touch of it in the
middle of the summer; and my mother was a notable housewife, who
scrubbed her three rooms and her seven children, her pots and pans, and
her chairs and tables, all day, and, on Saturdays, nearly all night,
long. It is fortunate for such things as pots and pans, and chairs and
tables, that they haven't any human feelings--at least, I never _heard_
a table talk, although I have read in the newspapers of their spinning
precious long yarns for fools and madmen to listen to (but what can you
expect from newspapers but lies?)--or they would have squalled for
certain, as we used to do under our mother's never-ending scrubbing and
scouring. When the soap got into our eyes, we used to halloa, and then
she used to dry our tears with a rough towel--I mean a towel made of a
bunch of twigs, tied together at one end with some string. My mother
was the most excellent woman that ever lived; but she had a strange idea
in her head that all children wanted physic, and that the very bast
doctor's stuff in the world was a birch rod, and plenty of it. Perhaps
my physickings did me no harm; at least, they prepared me for the
precious allowances of kicks, cuffs, and ropes-endings I got when I went
to sea.

I went to sea, because, when I was about ten years old, my father
thought that I had had enough schooling. _I_ thought that I had had
en