And some is born with bow-legs from the first —
And some that should have grow’d a good deal straighter,
But they were badly nurs’d,
And set, you see, like Bacchus, with their pegs
Astride of casks and kegs:
I’ve got myself a sort of bow to larboard,
And starboard,
And this is what it was that warp’d my legs. —
’Twas all along of Poll, as I may say,
That foul’d my cable when I ought to slip;
But on the tenth of May,
When I gets under weigh,
Down there in Hertfordshire, to join my ship,
I sees the mail
Get under sail,
The only one there was to make the trip.
Well — I gives chase,
But as she run
Two knots, to one,
There warn’t no use in keeping on the race!
Well — casting round about, what next to try on,
And how to spin,
I spies an ensign with a Bloody Lion,
And bears away to leeward for the inn,
Beats round the gable,
And fetches up before the coach-horse stable:
Well — there they stand, four kickers in a row.
And so
I just makes free to cut a brown ’un’s cable.
But riding isn’t in a seaman’s natur —
So I whips out a toughish end of yarn,
And gets a kind of sort of a land-waiter
To splice me, heel to heel,
Under the she-mare’s keel,
And off I goes, and leaves the inn a-starn!
My eyes! how she did pitch!
And wouldn’t keep her own to go in no line,
Tho’ I kept bowsing, bowsing at her bow-line,
But always making lee-way to the ditch,
And yaw’d her head about all sorts of ways.
The devil sink the craft!
And wasn’t she trimendus slack in stays!
We couldn’t, no how, keep the inn abaft!
Well — I suppose
We hadn’t run a knot — or much beyond —
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