concluded by a sonorous amen, he at last suffered himself to be led
upstairs; while my mother, who had slipped in and listened with much
edification to his words, hurried away to prepare him a bumper of green
usquebaugh with ten drops of Daffy's Elixir therein, which was her
sovereign recipe against the effects of a soaking. There was no event
in life, from a christening to a marriage, but had some appropriate food
or drink in my mother's vocabulary, and no ailment for which she had not
some pleasant cure in her well-stocked cupboards.

Master Decimus Saxon in my father's black Utrecht velvet and untanned
riding boots looked a very different man to the bedraggled castaway who
had crawled like a conger eel into our fishing-boat. It seemed as if he
had cast off his manner with his raiment, for he behaved to my mother
during supper with an air of demure gallantry which sat upon him better
than the pert and flippant carriage which he had shown towards us in the
boat. Truth to say, if he was now more reserved, there was a very good
reason for it, for he played such havoc amongst the eatables that there
was little time for talk. At last, after passing from the round of cold
beef to a capon pasty, and topping up with a two-pound perch, washed
down by a great jug of ale, he smiled upon us all and told us that his
fleshly necessities were satisfied for the nonce. 'It is my rule,' he
remarked, 'to obey the wise precept which advises a man to rise from
table feeling that he could yet eat as much as he has partaken of.'

'I gather from your words, sir, that you have yourself seen hard
service,' my father remarked when the board had been cleared and my
mother had retired for the night.

'I am an old fighting man,' our visitor answered, screwing his pipe
together, 'a lean old dog of the hold-fast breed. This body of mine