this delay was a credit to him.  Better be slow than sorry.  The church was, according to my wife, a very good one; and if the man had jumped into the job on the first day of his contract it might have been a very bad one.  So, when I used to take a good deal of time to turn myself before beginning any job, and my wife would say to one of the boys:  “Just wait!  He’ll start to build that church after a while!” I always took it as a compliment.  Finally I always did the thing, if after long study it seemed the right thing to do, or if some one else had not done it in the meantime; just as I finally told Captain Sproule that I expected to work on a passenger boat the next summer, and was told by him that he had sold his boat to a company, and was to be a passenger-boat captain himself the next summer; and would sign me on if I wanted to stay with him—­which I did.

[4] Irving’s impersonation of Homer must have nodded when he named this safe, sane and staunch worthy Hermanus Van Clattercop.—­G.v.d.M.

3

I was getting pretty stocky now, and no longer feared anything I was likely to meet.  I was well-known to the general run of canallers, and had very little fighting to do; once in a while a fellow would pick a fight with me because of some spite, frequently because I refused to drink with him, or because he was egged on to do it; and this year I was licked by three toughs in Batavia.  They left me senseless because I would not say “enough.”  I was getting a good deal of reputation as a wrestler.  I liked wrestling better than fighting; and though a smallish man always, like my fellow Iowan Farmer Burns, I have seldom found my master at this game.  It is much more a matter of sleight than strength.  A man must be cautious, wary, cool, his muscles always ready, as quick as a flash to meet any strain; but the main source of my success seemed to be my ability to use all the strength in every muscle of my body at any given instant, so as to overpower a much stronger opponent by pouring out on him so much power in a single burst of force that he was carried away and crushed.  I have thrown over my head and to a distance of ten feet men seventy-five pounds heavier than I was.  This is the only thing I ever did so well that I never met any one who could beat me.

I was of a fair complexion, with blue eyes, and my upper lip and chin were covered with a reddish fuzz over a very ruddy skin—­a little like David’s of old, I guess.  On the passenger boats I met a great many people, and was joked a good deal about the girls, some of whom seemed to take quite a shine to me, just as they do to any fair-haired, reasonably clean-looking boy; especially if he has a little reputation; but though I sometimes found myself looking at one of them with considerable interest there was not enough time for as slow a boy as I to begin, let alone to finish any courting operations on even as long a voyage as that from Albany to Buffalo.  I was really afraid of them all, and they seemed to know it, and made a good deal of fun of me.