bout noon I stopped at the captain’s door with some cooling drinks and medicines. He was lying very much as we had left him, only a little higher, and he seemed both weak and excited.
'Jim,' he said, 'you’re the only one here that’s worth anything, and you know I’ve been always good to you. Never a month but I’ve given you a silver fourpenny for yourself.
And now you see, mate, I’m pretty low, and deserted by all; and Jim, you’ll bring me one noggin of rum, now, won’t you, matey? ' 'The doctor—' I began. But he broke in cursing the doctor, in a feeble voice but heartily.
'Doctors is all swabs,' he said; 'and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men?
I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes—what to the doctor know of lands like that? —and I lived on rum, I tell you.
It’s been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me; and if I’m not to have my rum now I’m a poor old hulk on a lee shore, my blood’ll be on you, Jim, and that doctor swab'; and he ran on again for a while with curses.
'Look, Jim, how my fingers fidges,' he continued in the pleading tone. 'I can’t keep ’em still, not I. I haven’t had a drop this blessed day. That doctor’s a fool, I tell you.
If I don’t have a dram o’ rum, Jim, I’ll have the horrors; I seen some on ’em already.
I seen old Flint in the corner there, behind you; as plain as print, I seen him; and if I get the horrors, I’m a man that has lived rough, and I’ll