'Going where?' I cried, believing I had not correctly heard him, while Helga started from her drooping posture and turned to look at me.

'To Sydney, New South Wales, which is in Australey,' he exclaimed.

'In this small open boat?'

'This small open boat!' echoed one of the others. 'The Airly Marn's eighteen ton, and if she ben't big enough and good enough to carry three men to Australey there's nothen afloat as is going to show her how to do it!'

By the light shed by the dimly burning lantern, where it stood in the bottom of the boat, I endeavoured to gather from their faces whether they spoke seriously, or whether, indeed, they were under the influence of earlier drams of liquor than the dose they had swallowed from our jar.

'Are you in earnest, men?' said I.

'Airnest!' cried the man at the tiller in a voice of astonishment, as though he wondered at my wonder. 'Why, to be sure we are! What's wrong with us that we shouldn't be agoing to Australey?'

I glanced at the short length of dark fabric, and up at the black square of lugsail.

'What is taking you to Australia in a Deal lugger?' said I.

The man styled Abraham by his mates answered: 'We're a-carrying this here craft out on a job for the gent that's bought her. There was three of us an' a boy, but the boy took sick at Penzance, and we came away without him.'

He paused. The man sitting next him continued in a deep voice:

'A gent as lives in Lunnon took this here Airly Marn over for a debt. Well, when he got her he didn't know what to do with her. There was no good a-leaving her to pine away on the beach, so he tarns to and puts her up to auction. Well, there was ne'er a bid.'

'Ne'er a bid!' echoed the man who was steering.

'Ne'er a bid, I says,' continued the other, 'and whoy? First of all, there ain't no money in Deal; and next, the days of these luggers is nombered. Well, this here gent was called upon by an Australian friend who, gitting to hear of the Airly Marn, says he's a-willing to buy her for a sum. What that sum might be I'm not here for to know.

'Fifty pound, I allow,' said the man named Tommy. 'Some says she was guv away. I've heerd speak of thirty pound. 

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