pool, and I've got acquainted with a lot of A1 chaps that have
agreed to take me drift-fishing every night, and they are going to
put out the Clovelly lifeboat for exercise this week, and if the
weather is fine, Bill Marks is going to take Atlas and me to Lundy
Island. You don't catch me round the evening lamp very much in
Clovelly."

"Don't be too slangy, Tommy, and who on earth is Bill Marks?" asked
Jack.

"He's our particular friend, Tommy's and mine," answered Atlas,
seeing that Tommy was momentarily occupied with bacon and eggs.
"He told us more yarns than we ever before heard spun in the same
length of time. He is seventy-seven, and says he was a teetotaler
until he was sixty-nine, but has been trying to make up time ever
since. From his condition last evening, I should say he was likely
to do it. He was so mellow, I asked him how he could manage to
walk down the staircase. 'Oh, I can walk down neat enough,' he
said, 'when I'm in good sailing trim, as I am now, feeling just
good enough, but not too good, your honour; but when I'm half seas
over or three sheets in the wind, I roll down, your honour!' He
spends three shillings a week for his food and the same for his
'rummidge.' He was thrilling when he got on the subject of the
awful wreck just outside this harbour, 'the fourth of October,
seventy-one years ago, two-and-thirty men drowned, your honour, and
half of 'em from Clovelly parish. And I was one of the three men
saved in another storm twenty-four years agone, when two-and-twenty
men were drowned; that's what it means to plough the great salt
field that is never sown, your honour.' When he found we'd been in
Scotland, he was very anxious to know if we could talk 'Garlic,'