“I do not half like this boat-service in open daylight, Winchester,” observed the senior, beckoning to the other to take a chair.  “The least bungling may spoil it all; and then it’s ten to one but your ship goes half-manned for a twelvemonth, until you are driven to pressing from colliers and neutrals.”

“But we hope, sir, there’ll be no bungling in anything that the Proserpine undertakes.  Nine times in ten an English man-of-war succeeds when she makes a bold dash in boats against one of these picaroons.  This lugger is so low in the water, too, that it will be like stepping from one cutter into another to get upon her decks; and then, sir, I suppose, you don’t doubt what Englishmen will do?”

“Aye, Winchester, once on her deck, I make no doubt you’d carry her; but it may not be so easy as you imagine to get on her deck.  Of all duty to a captain, this of sending off boats is the most unpleasant.  He cannot go in person, and if anything unfortunate turns up he never forgives himself.  Now, it’s a very different thing with a fight in which all share alike, and the good or evil comes equally on all hands.”

“Quite true, Captain Cuffe; and yet this is the only chance that the lieutenants have for getting ahead a little out of the regular course.  I have heard, sir, that you were made commander for cutting out some coasters in the beginning of the war.”

“You have not been misinformed, and a devil of a risk we all ran.  Luck saved us—­and that was all.  One more fire from a cursed carronade would have given a Flemish account of the whole party; for, once get a little under, and you suffer like game in a batteau.”  Captain Cuffe wished to say battue; but, despising foreign languages, he generally made sad work with them whenever he did condescend to resort to their terms, however familiar.  “This Raoul Yvard is a devil incarnate himself at this boarding work, and is said to have taken off the head of a master’s mate of the Theseus with one clip of his sword when he retook that ship’s prize in the affair of last winter—­that which happened off Alicant!”

“I’ll warrant you, sir, the master’s mate was some slender-necked chap that might better have been at home, craning at the girls as they come out of a church-door.  I should like to see Raoul Yvard or any Frenchman who was ever born take off my head at a single clip!”

“Well, Winchester, to be frank with you, I should not.  You are a good first; and that is an office in which a man usually wants all the head he has; and I’m not at all certain you have any to spare.  I wonder if one could not hire a felucca, or something larger than a boat, in this place, by means of which we could play a trick upon this fellow, and effect our purpose quite as well as by going up to him in our open boats bull-dog fashion?”

“No question of it at all, sir; Griffin says there are a dozen feluccas in port here, all afraid to budge an inch in consequence of this chap’s being in the offing.  Now one of these trying to slip along shore might just serve as a bait for him, and then he would be famously hooked.”