“How’s this?” demanded Wilder; “Is not one enough?  There is some mistake between you.”

“No mistake at all,” responded Dick, suffering his oar to float on its blade, and running his fingers into his hair, as if he was content with his achievement “no more mistake than there is in taking the sun on a clear day and in smooth water.  Guinea is in the boat you hired; but a bad bargain you made of it, as I thought at the time; and so, as ’better late than never’ is my rule, I have just been casting an eye over all the craft; if this is not the tightest and fastest rowing clipper of them all, then am I no judge; and yet the parish priest would tell you, if he were here, that my father was a boat-builder, ay, and swear it too; that is to say, if you paid him well for the same.”

“Fellow,” returned Wilder, angrily, “you will one day induce me to turn you adrift.  Return the boat to the place where you found it, and see it secured in the same manner as before.”

“Turn me adrift!” deliberately repeated Fid, “that would be cutting all your weather lanyards at one blow, master Harry.  Little good would come of Scipio Africa and you, after I should part company.  Have you ever fairly logg’d the time we have sailed together?”

“Ay, have I; but it is possible to break even a friendship of twenty years.”

“Saving your presence, master Harry, I’ll be d——­d if I believe any such thing.  Here is Guinea, who is no better than a nigger, and therein far from being a fitting messmate to a white man; but, being used to look at his black face for four-and-twenty years, d’ye see, the colour has got into my eye, and now it suits as well as another.  Then, at sea, in a dark night, it is not so easy a matter to tell the difference.  No, no, I am not tired of you yet, master Harry; and it is no trifle that shall part us.”

“Then, abandon your habit of making free with the property of others.”

“I abandon nothing.  No man can say he ever knowed me to quit a deck while a plank stuck to the beams; and shall I abandon, as you call it, my rights?  What is the mighty matter, that all hands must be called to see an old sailor punished?  You gave a lubberly fisherman, a fellow who has never been in deeper water than his own line will sound you gave him, I say, a glittering Spaniard, just for the use of a bit of a skiff for the night, or, mayhap, for a small reach into the morning.  Well, what does Dick do?  He says to himself—­for d——­e if he’s any blab to run round a ship grumbling at his officer—­so he just says to himself, ‘That’s too much;’ and he looks about, to find the worth of it in some of the fisherman’s neighbours.  Money can be eaten; and, what is better, it may be drunk; therefore, it is not to be pitched overboard with the cook’s ashes.  I’ll warrant me, if the truth could be fairly come by, it would be found that, as to the owners of this here yawl, and that there skiff, their mothers are cousins, and that the dollar will go in snuff and strong drink among the whole family—­so, no great harm done, after all.”