money. There'll be something to take up when I gets home, something that'll loighten the loss o' my eight pound o' goods and clothes, and make the foundering of the Airly Marn easier to think of.'

'You and Abraham, then, have regularly entered yourselves for the round voyage?'

'Ay; the Capt'n put us on the articles this afternoon. He called us to his cabin and talked like a gemman to us. Tain't often as one meets the likes of him at sea. No language—a koind smoile—a thank'ee for whatever a man does, if so be as it's rightly done—a feeling consarn for your morals and your comforts: tell'ee, Mr. Tregarthen, the loikes of Capt'n Buntin' ain't agoin' to be fallen in with every day—leastways, in vessels arter this here pattern, where mostly a man's a dog in the cap'n's opinion, and where the mate's got no other argument than the fust iron belaying-pin he can out with.'

'I am very glad to learn that you are so well satisfied,' said I. 'A pity poor Thomas isn't with you.'

'Pore Tommy! There's nothen in my toime as has made me feel so ordinary as Thomas's drownding. But as to him making hisself happy here——'

'I beg your pardon, sah,' said a voice close beside me.

I turned, losing the remainder of Jacob's observations, and perceived the face of Nakier in the galley door, that was within an arm's length of me from where I leaned. His posture was one of hiding, as though to conceal himself from sight of the poop. As I looked, a copper-coloured face, with black, angry eyes flashing under a low forehead as wrinkled as the rind of an old apple, with the temper that worked in the creature, showed behind Nakier's head, and vanished in a breath. I now recollected that when I had first taken up my station under the lee of the galley I had caught the hiss of a swift fiery whispering within the little structure, but it had instantly ceased on my calling to Jacob, and the matter went out of my head as I listened to the boatman in the rigging.

'I beg your pardon, sah! May I speak a word wit you?'

'What is it, Nakier?' I exclaimed, finding a sort of pleasure in the mere contemplation of his handsome face and noble liquid Eastern eyes, dark and luminous like the gleam you will sometimes observe in a midnight sea.

'Are you a sailor, sah?'

'I am not,' I responded.

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