And Mr. Daddles solemnly took off his hat.

“Now, are you ready, boys?”

“Yes,” we all whispered.

“No, no!  Not ’yes’,” returned Mr. Daddles, with an agonized expression; “you must say ‘Ay, ay,—­heave ahead,’ and you must growl it.”

We all tried to growl:  “Ay, ay,—­heave ahead,” but we didn’t make much of a success of it.

“That’s fair,” said Mr. Daddles, “only fair.  You need lots of practice.  We ought to have rehearsed this before we started.  It’s embarrassing to do it here, with the eyes of the world upon us, so to speak.  Now try again.”

We tried again, and our leader said we had done much better.

“Ed,” he said, “walk with more of a roll in your gait,—­a deep-sea roll.  See—­this way.  And pull your hats down low over your eyes, and glance furtively from right to left.”

“I can’t roll, nor anything else,” Ed remarked, “until I get this pebble out of my shoe.”

And he sat down on the door-step of a house, and took off one shoe.  As he did so, the clock in a church belfry struck eleven.

“Eleven,” reflected Mr. Daddles.  “I mean:  ’tis the signal, men!  If the Cap’n has not failed us the lugger should be in the cove at this hour,—­and we coves should be in the lugger, too.  Ha! how like ye the pleasantry?  ’Tis a pretty wit I have, as no less a man than Mr. Pope himself told me at the Coca Tree—­No; I don’t believe Mr. Pope would know the mate of a gang of smugglers,—­do you?”

Jimmy Toppan and I assured him that the only Mr. Pope we knew was librarian of the Sunday School at home, and that if he knew any smugglers he had kept it a secret.  Ed Mason had got rid of his pebble, and he now joined us again.

“Are you ready, men?”

“Ay, ay,—­heave ahead!”

So we started once more.  The streets were black as ink.  They were paved with cobblestones, and there did not seem to be any side-walks.  The buildings were fishermen’s and clammers’ huts, boat-houses, and small shops,—­all dark and deserted.  The fog shut out everything at a short distance.  At the top of the hill there was one dim light in the rear of a little shanty.

“Hist!”

Mr. Daddles stopped us.

“It’s the lair of the old fox himself!”

“Who?”

“None but black-hearted Gregory the Gauger.  Him it was—­or one of his minions—­that killed old Diccon, our messmate, but a hundred paces from the cave, last Michaelmas.  Shall we go in and slit his weazand?”

We crept up to the window and looked in.  A little man, with chin-whiskers like a paintbrush, sat inside, shucking clams by the light of a lantern.  We decided not to go in and slit his weazand.  Suddenly he looked up, as if he had heard us, and then rising, started for the door.  We all darted back hastily, and hid in the shadow of the next building.  He came out, emptied the pail of clam-shells, looked toward the sky, yawned, and went in again.