“No, no; that would be uncharitable in the extreme.”

“The very words the chaplain used to let fly aboard the ‘Brunswick!’ It is a great thing to have schooling, your Honour; since, if it does nothing else, it fits a man for a boatswain, and puts him in the track of steering the shortest course to heaven.  But, as I was saying, there was I and Guinea shipmates and in a reasonable way friends, for five years more; and then the time arrived when we met with the mishap of the wreck in the West-Indies.”

“What wreck?” demanded his officer.

“I beg your Honour’s pardon; I never swing my head-yards till I’m sure the ship won’t luff back into the wind; and, before I tell the particulars of the wreck, I will overrun my ideas, to see that nothing is forgotten that should of right be first mentioned.”

The Rover, who saw, by the uneasy glances that she cast aside, and by the expression of her countenance how impatient his companion was becoming for a sequel that approached so tardily, and how much she dreaded an interruption, made a significant sign to her to permit the straight-going tar to take his own course, as the best means of coming at the facts they both longed so much to hear.  Left to himself, Fid soon took the necessary review of the transactions, in his own quaint manner; and, having happily found that nothing which he considered as germain to the present relation was omitted, he proceeded at once to the more material, and what was to his auditors by far the most interesting, portion of his narrative.

“Well, as I was telling your Honour,” he continued, “Guinea was then a maintopman, and I was stationed in the same place aboard the ‘Proserpine,’ a quick-going two-and-thirty, when we fell in with a bit of a smuggler, between the islands and the Spanish Main; and so the Captain made a prize of her, and ordered her into port; for which I have always supposed, as he was a sensible man, he had his orders.  But this is neither here nor there, seeing that the craft had got to the end of her rope, and foundered in a heavy hurricane that came over us, mayhap a couple of days’ run to leeward of our haven.  Well, she was a small boat; and, as she took it into her mind to roll over on her side before she went to sleep, the master’s mate in charge, and three others, slid off her decks to the bottom of the sea, as I have always had reason to believe, never having heard any thing to the contrary.  It was here that Guinea first served me the good turn; for, though we had often before shared hunger and thirst together, this was the first time he ever jumped overboard to keep me from taking in salt water like a fish.”

“He kept you from drowning with the rest?”