I would not allow him companions to make merry with
so as to make a pleasure of intoxication. I would then wait until next
morning when he was sober, and leave him alone with a racking headache
until the evening, when I would give him another dose, and so on,
forcing him to get drunk until he hated the smell of liquor."
"Well, Mr Simple, it might do with some, but many of our chaps would
require the dose you mention to be repeated pretty often before it would
effect a cure; and what's more, they'd be very willing patients, and
make no wry faces at their physic."
"Well, that might be, but it would cure them at last. But tell me,
Swinburne, were you ever in a hurricane?"
"I've been in everything, Mr Simple, I believe, except at school, and I
never had no time to go there. Do you see that battery at Needham Point?
Well, in the hurricane of '82, them same guns were whirled away by the
wind, right over to this point here on the opposite side, the sentries
in their sentry-boxes after them. Some of the soldiers who faced the
wind had their teeth blown down their throats like broken 'baccy-pipes,
others had their heads turned round like dog vanes, 'cause they waited
for orders to the '_right about face_,' and the whole air was full of
young _niggers_ blowing about like peelings of _ingons_."
"You don't suppose I believe all this, Swinburne?"
"That's as may be, Mr Simple, but I've told the story so often, that I
believe it myself."
"What ship were you in?"
"In the _Blanche_, Captain Faulkner, who was as fine a fellow as poor
Captain Savage, whom we buried yesterday; there could not be a finer
than either of them.
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