Rewards and Fairies - Penn State University

Rudyard Kipling
‘I had nigh a year at it, an’ we must have fetched off—oh, a up an’ down the narrer seas, with his beard not yet quilted
hundred pore folk, I reckon. Outrageous bold, too, Frankie out. He made a laughing-stock of everything all day, and he’d
growed to be. Outrageous cunnin’ he was. Once we was as hold our lives in the bight of his arm all the besom-black
near as nothin’ nipped by a tall ship off Tergoes Sands in a night among they Dutch sands; and we’d ha’ jumped overside
snowstorm. She had the wind of us, and spooned straight to behove him any one time, all of us.’
before it, shootin’ all bow guns. Frankie fled inshore smack ‘Then why did you try to poison him?’ Una asked wick-
for the beach, till he was atop of the first breakers. Then he edly, and Simon hung his head like a shy child.
hove his anchor out, which nigh tore our bows off, but it ‘Oh, that was when he set me to make a pudden, for be-
twitched us round end-for-end into the wind, d’ye see, an’ we cause our cook was hurted. I done my uttermost, but she all
clawed off them sands like a drunk man rubbin’ along a tav- fetched adrift like in the bag, an’ the more I biled the bits of
ern bench. When we could see, the Spanisher was laid flat her, the less she favoured any fashion o’ pudden. Moon he
along in the breakers with the snows whitening on his wet chawed and chammed his piece, and Frankie chawed and
belly. He thought he could go where Frankie went.’ chammed his’n, and—no words to it—he took me by the
‘What happened to the crew?’ said Una.
ear an’ walked me out over the bow-end, an’ him an’ Moon
‘We didn’t stop,’ Simon answered. ‘There was a very liddle hove the pudden at me on the bowsprit gub by gub, some-
new baby in our hold, and the mother she wanted to get to thing cruel hard!’ Simon rubbed his hairy cheek.
some dry bed middlin’ quick. We runned into Dover, and ‘“Nex’ time you bring me anything,” says Frankie, “you
said nothing.’
bring me cannon-shot an’ I’ll know what I’m getting.” But as
‘Was Sir Francis Drake very much pleased?’ ‘Heart alive, for poisonin’— ‘He stopped, the children laughed so.
maid, he’d no head to his name in those days. He was just a ‘Of course you didn’t,’ said Una. ‘Oh, Simon, we do like
outrageous, valiant, crop-haired, tutt-mouthed boy, roarin’ you!’
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