"Very good."
"An', plaze sir, av ye'll take the throuble to look in at Mrs. Meetuck
in passin', it'll do yer heart good, it will."
"Very well, we'll look in," replied the captain as he quitted the house
of the worthy pastor.
The personage whom O'Riley chose to style Mrs. Meetuck was Meetuck's
grandmother. That old lady was an Esquimau, whose age might be
algebraically expressed as an _unknown quantity_. She lived in a boat
turned upside down, with a small window in the bottom of it, and a hole
in the side for a door. When Captain Ellice and Fred looked in, the old
woman, who was a mere mass of bones and wrinkles, was seated on a heap
of moss beside a fire, the only chimney to which was a hole in the
bottom of the boat. In front of her sat her grandson Meetuck, and on a
cloth spread out at her feet were displayed all the presents with which
that good hunter had been loaded by his comrades of the _Dolphin_.
Meetuck's mother had died many years before, and all the affection in
his naturally warm heart was transferred to, and centred upon, his old
grandmother. Meetuck's chief delight in the gifts he received was in
sharing them, as far as possible, with the old woman. We say _as far as
possible_, because some things could not be shared with her, such as a
splendid new rifle and a silver-mounted hunting-knife and powder-horn,
all of which had been presented to him by Captain Guy over and above his
wages, as a reward for his valuable services.
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