You’ve seen a yacht upon the sea,
     She dances and she dances, O! 
     As fair is my wild maid to me...

Something about ‘prances, O!’ on her horse, you know, or you’re a hem’d fool if you don’t.  I never could sing; wish I could!  It’s the joy of life!  It’s utterance!  Hey for harmony!”

“Eh! brayvo! now you’re a man, Steeve! and welcomer and welcomest; yi—­yi, O!” jolly Butcher Billing sang out sharp.  “Life wants watering.  Here’s a health to Robert Eccles, wheresoever and whatsoever! and ne’er a man shall say of me I didn’t stick by a friend like Bob.  Cheers, my lads!”

Robert’s health was drunk in a thunder, and praises of the purity of the brandy followed the grand roar.  Mrs. Boulby received her compliments on that head.

“’Pends upon the tide, Missis, don’t it?” one remarked with a grin broad enough to make the slyness written on it easy reading.

“Ah! first a flow and then a ebb,” said another.

     “It’s many a keg I plant i’ the mud,
     Coastguardsman, come! and I’ll have your blood!”

Instigation cried, “Cut along;” but the defiant smuggler was deficient in memory, and like Steeve Bilton, was reduced to scatter his concluding rhymes in prose, as “something about;” whereat jolly Butcher Billing, a reader of song-books from a literary delight in their contents, scraped his head, and then, as if he had touched a spring, carolled,—­

     “In spite of all you Gov’ment pack,
     I’ll land my kegs of the good Cognyac”—­

“though,” he took occasion to observe when the chorus and a sort of cracker of irrelevant rhymes had ceased to explode; “I’m for none of them games.  Honesty!—­there’s the sugar o’ my grog.”

“Ay, but you like to be cock-sure of the stuff you drink, if e’er a man did,” said the boatbuilder, whose eye blazed yellow in this frothing season of song and fun.

“Right so, Will Moody!” returned the jolly butcher:  “which means—­not wrong this time!”

“Then, what’s understood by your sticking prongs into your hostess here concerning of her brandy?  Here it is—­which is enough, except for discontented fellows.”

“Eh, Missus?” the jolly butcher appealed to her, and pointed at Moody’s complexion for proof.

It was quite a fiction that kegs of the good cognac were sown at low water, and reaped at high, near the river-gate of the old Pilot Inn garden; but it was greatly to Mrs. Boulby’s interest to encourage the delusion which imaged her brandy thus arising straight from the very source, without villanous contact with excisemen and corrupting dealers; and as, perhaps, in her husband’s time, the thing had happened, and still did, at rare intervals, she complacently gathered the profitable fame of her brandy being the best in the district.

“I’m sure I hope you’re satisfied, Mr. Billing,” she said.

The jolly butcher asked whether Will Moody was satisfied, and Mr. William Moody declaring himself thoroughly satisfied, “then I’m satisfied too!” said the jolly butcher; upon which the boatbuilder heightened the laugh by saying he was not satisfied at all; and to escape from the execrations of the majority, pleaded that it was because his glass was empty:  thus making his peace with them.  Every glass in the room was filled again.