“This look like a pair of skylarks to you?” asked Captain Barkis, at his desk in the low-ceilinged cabin.

First mate Watkins, standing beside him, regarded the boys with a wry expression. “Can’t claim to be versed in orth’nology sir, but I’d call ‘em a rook an’ a raven myself, an’ right scruffy ones, too.”

It was a gloomy gray morning in London with fog hanging heavily over the Thames, the leaden light through the stern windows bolstered by the golden glow of a gimbaled lamp on an overhead beam; and “scruffy” seemed a polite understatement describing the pair of ragamuffins who may have been around thirteen, one plump as a cherub and peaches and cream despite all the city soot on his face, with winsomely large and bright blue eyes half-hidden beneath a mop of blond hair and shadowed by a big floppy cap, the other boy a half a head taller, as deep dusky black as a collier’s cargo, his hair, under a similar cap, a ropy mane of tangled locks, and with maybe a muscular build, though his true shape, like his companion’s, was cloaked in castoff oversize clothes consisting of coarse cotton shirts which may have been white in the far distant past, and likewise too large and tattered peacoats draping them down to their knees, their hands out of sight in the long, frayed sleeves, and equally ragged blue canvas trousers puddling over dirty bare feet with only their grimy toes on display and the blond boy’s as black as the black’s. In keeping with their disreputable looks, both smelled like wet but seldom soaped goats.

“I’m of a similar mind,” said the captain, a portly man with a short grizzled beard and a ruddy and well-weathered twinkle-eyed face that suggested an inclination to smile despite its current appraising expression like a god regarding doubtful creations and possibly having second-thoughts. He took a long pull on his pipe and exorcised a cognitive specter. “An’ what be your experience, birds?