“I do not like this brig, aunty, and now we are out of her, I wish we could keep out of her.  Nor do I like your Captain Spike, who seems to me anything but an agreeable gentleman.”

“That’s because you arn’t accustomed to the sea.  My poor Mr. Budd had his ways, like all the rest of them; it takes time to get acquainted with them.  All sailors are so.”

Rose bent her face involuntarily, but so low as to conceal the increasing brightness of her native bloom, as she answered,

“Harry Mulford is not so, aunty, dear—­and he is every inch a sailor.”

“Well, there is a difference, I must acknowledge, though I dare say Harry will grow every day more and more like all the rest of them.  In the end, he will resemble Captain Spike.”

“Never,” said Rose, firmly.

“You can’t tell, child.  I never saw your uncle when he was Harry’s age, for I was n’t born till he was thirty, but often and often has he pointed out to me some slender, genteel youth, and say, `just such a lad was I at twenty,’ though nothing could be less alike, at the moment he was speaking, than they two.  We all change with our years.  Now I was once as slender, and almost—­not quite, Rosy, for few there are that be—­but almost as handsome as you yourself.”

“Yes, aunty, I’ve heard that before,” said Rose, springing up, in order to change the discourse; “but Harry Mulford will never become like Stephen Spike.  I wish we had never known the man, dearest aunty.”

“It was all your own doings, child.  He’s a cousin of your most intimate friend, and she brought him to the house; and one could n’t offend Mary Mulford, by telling her we did n’t like her cousin.”

Rose seemed vexed, and she kept her little foot in motion, patting the sail that formed the carpet, as girls will pat the ground with their feet when vexed.  This gleam of displeasure was soon over, however, and her countenance became as placid as the clear, blue sky that formed the vault of the heavens above her head.  As if to atone for the passing rebellion of her feelings, she threw her arms around her aunt’s neck; after which she walked away, along the beach, ruminating on her present situation, and of the best means of extricating their party from the power of Spike.

It requires great familiarity with vessels and the seas, for one to think, read, and pursue the customary train of reasoning on board a ship that one has practised ashore.  Rose had felt this embarrassment during the past month, for the whole of which time she had scarcely been in a condition to act up to her true character, suffering her energies, and in some measure her faculties, to be drawn into the vortex produced by the bustle, novelties, and scenes of the vessel and the ocean.  But, now she was once more on the land, diminutive and naked as was the islet that composed her present world, and she found leisure and solitude for reflection and decision.  She was not ignorant