Rewards and Fairies - Penn State University

Rudyard Kipling
hadn’t time to call or think. I remember the smack heeling action on account of hearing guns in the fog. Uncle Aurette
over, and me standing on the gunwale pushing against the and Captain Giddens must have been passing the time o’ day
ship’s side as if I hoped to bear her off. Then the square of an with each other off Newhaven, and the frigate had drifted
open port, with a lantern in it, slid by in front of my nose. I past ‘em. She never knew she’d run down our smack. Seeing
kicked back on our gunwale as it went under and slipped so many aboard was total strangers to each other, I thought
through that port into the French ship—me and my fiddle.’ one more mightn’t be noticed; so I put Aunt Cecile’s red cap
‘Gracious!’ said Una. ‘What an adventure!’
on the back of my head, and my hands in my pockets like the
‘Didn’t anybody see you come in?’ said Dan.
rest, and, as we French say, I circulated till I found the galley.
‘There wasn’t any one there. I’d made use of an orlop-deck ‘“What! Here’s one of ‘em that isn’t sick!” says a cook. “Take
port—that’s the next deck below the gun-deck, which by rights his breakfast to Citizen Bompard.”
should not have been open at all. The crew was standing by ‘I carried the tray to the cabin, but I didn’t call this Bompard
their guns up above. I rolled on to a pile of dunnage in the “Citizen.” Oh no! “Mon Capitaine” was my little word, same
dark and I went to sleep. When I woke, men was talking all as Uncle Aurette used to answer in King Louis’ Navy.
round me, telling each other their names and sorrows just Bompard, he liked it. He took me on for cabin servant, and
like Dad told me pressed men used to talk in the last war. after that no one asked questions; and thus I got good vict-
Pretty soon I made out they’d all been hove aboard together uals and light work all the way across to America. He talked a
by the press-gangs, and left to sort ‘emselves. The ship she heap of politics, and so did his officers, and when this Am-
was the Embuscade, a thirty-six-gun Republican frigate, Capbassador Genet got rid of his land-stomach and laid down
tain Jean Baptiste Bompard, two days out of Le Havre, going the law after dinner, a rooks’ parliament was nothing com-
to the United States with a Republican French Ambassador pared to their cabin. I learned to know most of the men which
of the name of Genet. They had been up all night clearing for had worked the French Revolution, through waiting at table
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