twin peeped, and to revisit his horrible house, and look at him in
his blue and spotty and screaming stage, as he reached from floor
to ceiling and from wall to wall. The young woman who brought me
acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my
terrors, and used to begin, I remember – as a sort of introductory
overture – by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long
low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in
combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to
plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear
the story again just yet. But, she never spared me one word of it,
and indeed commanded the awful chalice to my lips as the only
preservative known to science against ‘The Black Cat’ – a weird and
glaring-eyed supernatural Tom, who was reputed to prowl about the
world by night, sucking the breath of infancy, and who was endowed
with a special thirst (as I was given to understand) for mine.
This female bard – may she have been repaid my debt of obligation
to her in the matter of nightmares and perspirations! – reappears
in my memory as the daughter of a shipwright. Her name was Mercy,
though she had none on me. There was something of a shipbuilding
flavour in the following story. As it always recurs to me in a
vague association with calomel pills, I believe it to have been
reserved for dull nights when I was low with medicine.
There was once a shipwright, and he wrought in a Government Yard,
and his name was Chips. And his father’s name before him was
Chips, and HIS father’s name before HIM was Chips, and they were
all Chipses. And Chips the father had sold himself to the Devil
for an iron pot and a bushel of tenpenny nails and half a ton of
copper and a rat that could speak; and Chips the grandfather had
sold himself to the Devil for an iron pot and a bushel of tenpenny
nails and half a ton of copper and a rat that could speak; and
Chips the great-grandfather had disposed of himself in the same
direction on the same terms; and the bargain had run in the family
for a long, long time. So, one day, when young Chips was at work
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in the Dock Slip all alone, down in the dark hold of an old
Seventy-four that was haled up for repairs, the Devil presented
himself, and remarked:
‘A Lemon has pips,
And a Yard has ships,
And I’ll have Chips!’
(I don’t know why, but this fact of the Devil’s expressing himself
in rhyme was peculiarly trying to me.) Chips looked up when he
heard the words, and there he saw the Devil with saucer eyes that
squinted on a terrible great scale, and that struck out sparks of
blue fire continually. And whenever he winked his eyes, showers of
blue sparks came out, and his eyelashes made a clattering like
flints and steels striking lights. And hanging over one of his
arms by the handle was an iron pot, and under that arm was a bushel
of tenpenny nails, and under his other arm was half a ton of
copper, and sitting on one of his shoulders was a rat that could
speak. So, the Devil said again:
‘A Lemon has pips,
And a Yard has ships,
And I’ll have Chips!’
(The invariable effect of this alarming tautology on the part of
the Evil Spirit was to deprive me of my senses for some moments.)
So, Chips answered never a word, but went on with his work. ‘What
are you doing, Chips?’ said the rat that could speak. ‘I am
putting in new planks where you and your gang have eaten old away,’
said Chips. ‘But we’ll eat them too,’ said the rat that could
speak; ‘and we’ll let in the water and drown the crew, and we’ll
eat them too.’ Chips, being only a shipwright, and not a Man-ofwar’s
man, said, ‘You are welcome to it.’ But he couldn’t keep his