Mrs. Tackabird said nothing.  She was busy making sausages and setting down a stug of butter for her man’s use on the voyage.  But he knew she would be a disappointed woman if he didn’t contrive in some honest way to turn the tables on the Company and their new pet.  For days together he went about whistling “Tho’ troubles assail ... “; and the very night before sailing, as they sat quiet, one each side of the hearth, he made the old woman jump by saying all of a sudden, “Coals o’ fire!”

“What d’ee mean by that?” she asked.

“Nothin’.  I was thinkin’ to myself, and out it popped.”

“Well, ’tis like a Providence!  For, till you said that, I’d clean forgot the sifter for your cuddy fire.  Mustn’t waste cinders now that you’re only a mate.”

Being a woman, she couldn’t forego that little dig; but she got up there and then and gave the old boy a kiss.

She wouldn’t walk down to the quay, though, next day, to see him off, being certain (she said) to lose her temper at the sight of Cap’n Dick carrying on as big as bull’s beef, not to mention the sneering shareholders and their wives.  So Cap’n Jacka took his congees at his own door, and turned, half-way down the street, and waved a good-bye with the cinder-sifter.  She used to say afterwards that this was Providence, too.

The Unity ran straight across until she made Ushant Light; and after cruising about for a couple of days, in moderate weather (it being the first week in April) Cap’n Dick laid her head east and began to nose up Channel, keeping an easy little distance off the French coast.  You see, the Channel was full of our ships and neutrals in those days, which made fat work for the French privateers; but the Frenchies’ own vessels kept close over on their coast; and even so, the best our boys could expect, nine times out of ten when they’d crossed over, was to run against a chasse-maree dodging between Cherbourg and St. Malo or Morlaix, with naval stores or munitions of war.

However, Cap’n Dick had very good luck.  One morning, about three leagues N.W. of Roscoff, what should he see but a French privateering craft of about fifty tons (new measurement) with an English trader in tow—­a London brig, with a cargo of all sorts, that had fallen behind her convoy and been snapped up in mid-channel.  Cap’n Dick had the weather-gauge, as well as the legs of the French chasse-maree.  She was about a league to leeward when the morning lifted and he first spied her.  By seven o’clock he was close, and by eight had made himself master of her and the prize, with the loss of two men only and four wounded, the Frenchman being short-handed, by reason of the crew he’d put into the brig to work her into Morlaix.

This was first-rate business.  To begin with, the brig (she was called the Martha Edwards, of London) would yield a tidy little sum for salvage.  The wind being fair for Plymouth, Cap’n Dick sent her into that port—­her own captain and crew working her, of course, and thirty Frenchmen on board in irons.  And at Plymouth she arrived without any mishap.