While my father and Ben are thus engaged, I will give the reader a
description of the latter.

Ben was a very tall, broad-shouldered old fellow, but stooping a little
from age. I should think he must have been at least sixty, if not more;
still he was a powerful, sinewy man. His nose, which was no small one,
had been knocked on one side, as he told me, by the flukes (_i.e._,
tail) of a whale, which cut in half a boat of which he was steersman. He
had a very large mouth, with very few teeth in it, having lost them by
the same accident; which, to use his own expression, had at the time
"knocked his figure-head all to smash." He had sailed many years in the
whale fisheries, had at last been pressed, and served as quartermaster
on board of a frigate for eight or nine years, when his ankle was broken
by the rolling of a spar in a gale of wind. He was in consequence
invalided for Greenwich. He walked stiff on this leg, and usually
supported himself with a thick stick. Ben had noticed me from the time
that my mother first came to Fisher's Alley. He was the friend of my
early days, and I was very much attached to him.

A minute or two afterward my father pushed the pot of porter to him. Ben
drank, and then said:

"Those be nice children, both on 'em--I know them well."

"And what kind of a craft is the mother?" replied my father.

"Oh! why, she's a little queer at times--she's always so mighty
particular about gentility."