Portsmouth people, Captain Dean claimed, were the best people in the worldthe kindest, the most hospitable, the most generous, the most appreciative, the most civilized of any people anywhere in America and he'd run no risk of offering them rancid butter.
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England, he said, except for its Langmans and gipsies, its beggars and whores, its thieves, snobs, toadies, fops, rakes, gambling schemes, press gangs, wasn't half bad; but if it weren't for his brother Jasper and his obligation to sail ships in accordance with Jasper's plans, he would get himself a home in Portsmouth.
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"Sometimes," he said in his solid, mild way, "I think Englishmen are all a pack of bastards; but Portsmouth people aren't. They don't think the way we do. It's something about the climate, probably. Those who can stand it have something happen to them. Even the lobsters grow two big claws."
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For the first time since that terrible twenty-ninth of July, Neal Butler's smile came back to him in Killybegs. When he finished his copying of The Seaman's Secrets, Captain Dean set him to drawing the coast line of America from a worn Mercator's Projection, starting with Cape Sable in Nova Scotia and working as far south as New York.
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Perhaps the prospect of America helped Neal to forget the happenings of July 29th: perhaps the scents and the sights and the soundsthe calmness and remotenessof that placid pretty harbor of Killybegs started him talking to the captain about fish. But talk he did, and soon, with the captain's permission, he and Swede were thick as porridge with a dozen fishermen, so that they knew where to go to fish, and kept the galley well supplied.
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