"
"The tide is fuller, Levin," Joe Johnson cried, "your keel is clear. Now
pint her for Manokin. So bingavast, my benen cove, and may you chant all
by yourself when I am gone!"
"God bless the boys!" the islander cried, "an' k-keep them from the
f-fire everlasting that is burning in your jug. And s-s-stranger,
remember the end of Eb-b-benezer Johnson, an' repent!"
The old man, barefooted, stoop-shouldered, stuttering, yet with a chord
of natural rhetoric in his high fiddle-string of a windpipe, stood
looking after them till they passed down the thoroughfare under the
jib-sail, and Joe Johnson did not say a word till some marsh brush
intervened between them, he being apparently under a remnant of that
panic which had seized him on the camp-ground.
"That's a good man," Levin Dennis said, giving the tiller to Jack
Wonnell and raising the sail; "he preached to the Britishers when they
sailed from Tangiers Islands to take Baltimore, and told 'em they would
be beat an' their gineral killed. He's made the oystermen all round yer
jine the island churches an' keep Sunday. That stutterin' leaves him
when he preaches, and when he leads the shout in meetin' it's piercin'
as a horn."
"He's a bloody Romany rogue," Joe Johnson muttered, "to tell me such a
tale! But, kirjalis! he cursed not me!"
"What language is that, Mr. Johnson? Is it Dutch or Porteygee?"
"It's what we call the gypsy; some calls it the Quaker.
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