“Let the light sails lift a little, boy; let her lift keep every inch you can, or you’ll not weather the slaver.  Luff, I say, sir; luff.”

“The slaver!” muttered our adventurer, hastening to a part of the ship whence he could command a view of that important, and to him doubly interesting ship; “ay, the slaver! it may be difficult, indeed to weather upon the slaver!”

He had unconsciously placed himself near Mrs Wyllys and Gertrude; the latter of whom was leaning on the rail of the quarter-deck, regarding the strange vessel at anchor, with a pleasure far from unnatural to her years and sex.

“You may laugh at me, and call me fickle, and perhaps credulous, dear Mrs Wyllys,” the unsuspecting girl cried, just as Wilder had taken the foregoing position, “but I wish we were well out of this ‘Royal Caroline,’ and that our passage was to be made in yonder beautiful ship!”

“It is indeed a beautiful ship!” returned Wyllys; “but I know not that it would be safer, or more comfortable, than the one we are in.”

“With what symmetry and order the ropes are arranged! and how like a bird it floats upon the water!”

“Had you particularized the duck, the comparison would have been exactly nautical,” said the governess, smiling mournfully; “you show capabilities my love, to be one day a seaman’s wife.”

Gertrude blushed a little; and, turning back her head to answer in the playful vein of her governess, her eye met the riveted look of Wilder, fastened on herself.  The colour on her cheek deepened to a carnation, and she was mute; the large gipsy hat she wore serving to conceal both her face and the confusion which so deeply suffused it.

“You make no answer, child, as if you reflected seriously on the chances,” continued Mrs Wyllys, whose thoughtful and abstracted mien, however, sufficiently proved she scarcely knew what she uttered.

“The sea is too unstable an element for my taste,” Gertrude coldly answered.  “Pray tell me, Mrs Wyllys, is the vessel we are approaching a King’s ship?  She has a warlike, not to say a threatening exterior.”

“The pilot has twice called her a slaver.”

“A slaver!  How deceitful then is all her beauty and symmetry!  I will never trust to appearances again, since so lovely an object can be devoted to so vile a purpose.”

“Deceitful indeed!” exclaimed Wilder aloud, under an impulse that he found as irresistible as it was involuntary.  “I will take upon myself to say, that a more treacherous vessel does not float the ocean than yonder finely proportioned and admirably equipped”——­

“Slaver,” added Mrs Wyllys, who had time to turn, and to look all her astonishment, before the young man appeared disposed to finish his own sentence.

“Slaver;” he said with emphasis, bowing at the same time, as if he would thank her for the word.