polished; and they were not secured with the usual appliance of a padlock, but were provided with an expensive mortise-lock, which could be operated upon either side. If Captain Carboneer had tried to open that door, he would have found that it was fastened; but perhaps he could not have discovered that it had been secured upon the inside. Unless, therefore, he had taken the trouble to break open the door, he could not have ascertained that Christy Passford was actually in the cabin.

Possibly, if he had opened the door by any means, he would not have discovered that the proprietor of the boat was in this dainty apartment, for the skipper had taken a great deal of pains to conceal himself so that he should not be seen, even if the intruders in the Florence had 72 succeeded in opening the doors without the aid of the key in his pocket. Though he had two very nice berths in the cabin, miraculously arranged as to space, Christy did not occupy one on the present occasion, for in that case the unbidden visitors would have seen him if their curiosity had led them to force the doors.

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When the cook of the Florence, usually the skipper of the craft, was engaged in the practice of the culinary art, he seated himself on what looked like a box in front of the stove. But the interior of this box was really a part of the cabin, for it contained the feet of any one occupying the berth on the starboard side. The cookroom had no end of bins, lockers and drawers to contain the variety of provisions and stores necessary to get up a dinner for the skipper and his guests, when he had any. And even all these places could not contain everything that was needed on board. Under the two berths were large, though not very deep, lockers, one of which contained the jib-topsail of the craft, and other spare sails, while the opposite one was the fuel locker of the sloop.

As the boat had not been used for a long time in cruising, the fuel receptacle was empty, though 73 a spare gaff-topsail had been thrown into it. This locker was big enough to admit the body-corporate of the skipper. It was not a particularly clean place, for a portion of it had been economized for the stowage of the charcoal, which the skipper preferred to wood. But he did not rebel at the blackness of the retreat he had chosen, for he wore his boating dress, which was hardly stylish enough for a dude or a dandy.

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But Skipper Passford did not crawl into this black hole for the fun of the thing. He had been spending his time 

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