He shared breakfast with Skipper, who, instead of eating, washed down with a cup of coffee fifty grains of quinine wrapped in a cigarette paper, and who complained to the mate that he would have to get under the blankets and sweat out the fever that was attacking him.  Despite his chill, and despite his teeth that were already beginning to chatter³ while the burning sun extracted the moisture in curling mist-wreaths from the deck planking, Van Horn cuddled Jerry in his arms and called him princeling, and prince, and a king, and a son of kings.

 

For Van Horn had often listened to the recitals⁴ of Jerry’s pedigree by Tom Haggin, over Scotch-and-sodas, when it was too pestilentially hot to go to bed.  And the pedigree was as royal-blooded as was possible for an Irish terrier to possess, whose breed, beginning with the ancient Irish wolf-hound, had been moulded and established by man in less than two generations of men.

 

There was Terrence the Magnificent—descended⁵, as Van Horn remembered, from the American-bred Milton Droleen, out of the Queen of County Antrim, Breda Muddler, which royal bitch, as every one who is familiar with the stud book knows, goes back as far as the almost mythical⁷ Spuds, with along the way no primrose⁸ dallyings with black-and-tan Killeney Boys and Welsh nondescripts.  And did not Biddy trace to Erin, mother and star of the breed, through a long descendant out of Breda Mixer, herself an ancestress of Breda Muddler?  Nor could be omitted from the purple record the later ancestress, Moya Doolen.

 

So Jerry knew the

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