occupy one; I and our charge the other. We found the air as carefully excluded from both as if air were fatal to life; and there were more dirty clothes and bandboxes under the beds, than I should have thought the family possessed. But, we considered ourselves well off, notwithstanding, for a more solitary place we could not have found.
While we were comforting ourselves by the fire after our meal, the Jack—who was sitting in a corner, and who had a bloated pair of shoes on, which he had exhibited while we were eating our eggs and bacon, as interesting relics that he had taken a few days ago from the feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore—asked me if we had seen a four-oared galley going up with the tide? When I told him No, he said she must have gone down then, and yet she "took up too," when she left there.
"They must ha' thought better on't for some reason or another," said the Jack, "and gone down."
"A four-oared galley did you say?" said I.
"A four," said the Jack, "and two sitters."
"Did they come ashore here?"
"They put in with a stone two-gallon jar, for some beer. I'd ha' been glad to pison the beer myself," said the Jack, "or put some rattling physic in it."
"Why?"
"I know why," said the Jack. He spoke in a slushy voice, as if much mud had washed into his throat.
"He thinks," said the landlord: a weakly meditative man with a pale eye, who seemed to rely greatly on his Jack: "he thinks they was, what they wasn't."
"I knows what I thinks," observed the Jack.
"You thinks Custom 'Us, Jack?" said the landlord.
"I do," said the Jack.
"Then you're wrong, Jack."
"Am I!"
In the infinite meaning of his reply and his boundless confidence in his views, the Jack took one of his bloated shoes off, looked into it, knocked a few stones out of it on the kitchen floor, and put it on again. He did this with
