You Would
Have Thought You Heard Some Gormandizer Dilating Upon The Roasting A
Savory Goose At Michaelmas As He Described The Roasting Of Some Spanish
Don To Make Him Discover His Treasure - A Detail Given With A Minuteness
That Made Every Rich Old Burgher Present Turn Uncomfortably In His
Chair.
All this would be told with infinite glee, as if he considered
it an excellent joke; and then he would give such a tyrannical leer in
the face of his next neighbor, that the poor man would be fain to laugh
out of sheer faint-heartedness.
If any one, however, pretended to
contradict him in any of his stories he was on fire in an instant. His
very cocked hat assumed a momentary fierceness, and seemed to resent
the contradiction. - "How the devil should you know as well as I! I tell
you it was as I say!" and he would at the same time let slip a
broadside of thundering oaths and tremendous sea phrases, such as had
never been heard before within those peaceful walls.
Indeed, the worthy burghers began to surmise that he knew more of these
stories than mere hearsay. Day after day their conjectures concerning
him grew more and more wild and fearful. The strangeness of his
manners, the mystery that surrounded him, all made him something
incomprehensible in their eyes. He was a kind of monster of the deep to
them - he was a merman - he was behemoth - he was leviathan - in short,
they knew not what he was.
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