letter I posted to her in India; therefore, I should have to consider

myself engaged to her all that time.’

‘No doubt,’ said I, beginning to feel bored.

‘Miss Temple would take that view,’ said he, ‘and that’s why I don’t choose to tell her the truth.’

‘I don’t quite follow your logic,’ I exclaimed; ‘but no matter. It may be that you want too much in the way of sweethearts. But so far as your secret goes, you can trust me to hold my tongue. Possibly, I may admire Miss Temple as warmly as you do; see qualities in her superior even to her excellence as a mistress of postures; but I do not yet love her so passionately as not to wish to see her chastened a bit by the lesson she is likely to learn from your delight in her society.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he exclaimed, lazily knocking the ashes of his pipe out through the open porthole.

‘Neither do I,’ cried I, springing to my legs with a loud yawn. ‘Heaven bless us, my dear Colledge! here are we now, I daresay, a fair thousand miles from the nearest African headland. Surely we are distant enough from all civilisation, then, to be clear of the influence of the girls! Take my advice, and keep your heart whole till you get to India. There may be a Princess waiting for you there, more likely to value a tiger-hide offering than Miss Temple; whilst Miss Crawley’s broken heart will mend apace when she learns that your wife has a black skin.’

‘Oh, hang it all!’ I heard him begin; but I was sick of the subject, and sauntered forth to see what was doing on deck.

There was very little wind; indeed, here and there about the sea were glass-like swathes riding the quiet pulse of the long slow swell in scythe-shaped horns, as though, in fact, there was to be a dead calm anon. Only the topmost and lightest canvas was asleep; the heavier cloths hung up and down with no more of life in them than what they got out of the heave of the ship; and deep as we yet were in the heart of the North Atlantic, there was, it seemed to me, a true tropic touch in the aspect of things--in the clear pale blue of the sky; in the sluggish crawling of the clouds, with their rounded brows stealing out in a copperish hue; in the wavering of the atmosphere over the hot line of the bulwarks, as though there was a sort of steam going up from the wood; in the parched look of the running-gear, and in the salt glistening of the white planks; in the figures of crimson-faced men, their feet naked, their arms and chests bare, again and again coming to the great scuttle butt, lashed a bit forward of the gangway, and drinking from the metal dipper.

When I arrived on the poop, I found the captain standing aft surrounded by a number of ladies, directing a binocular glass at the sea over the starboard bow. The chief mate at the head of the poop ladder was likewise staring into the same quarter, with Mr. Johnson alongside, bothering him with questions, and little Saunders on tip-toe, to see over the rail, fanning his face with a large flapping black wide-awake.

I stepped to the side to look, and saw some object about a mile distant, that emitted a wet flash of light from time to time. I asked the mate to lend me his glass, and at once made the thing out to be a capsized hull of a vessel of about eighty tons. She floated almost to the line of her yellow sheathing, and the gold-like metal rising wet to the sun from the soft sweep of the blue brine darted flashes as dazzling as flame from the mouth of a cannon.

I returned the glass to Mr. Prance.

‘She has not been long in that condition, I think?’ said I.

‘Not twenty-four hours, I should say,’ he answered. ‘I see no wreckage floating about her.’

‘Nor I. If she had a crew on board when she turned turtle,’ I said, ‘she may have clapped down upon them as you imprison flies under a tumbler.’

‘God bless us, what a dreadful death to die!’ cried little Saunders. ‘I can conceive of no agony to equal that of being in a cabin in a sinking ship and going down with her, and _knowing_ that she is under water and still settling.’

The little chap shuddered and pulled out a great blue pocket-handkerchief, with which he dried his forehead.

‘How long could a man live in a cabin under water?’ asked Mr. Johnson.

‘Long enough to come off with his life,’ answered the mate, bringing the glass from his eye and looking at Mr. Johnson. ‘I’ll give you a queer yarn in a few words, sir; wild enough to furnish out an A1 copper-bottomed sea-tale to some one of you literary gentlemen. A small vessel was dismasted ’twixt Tariffa and Tangier in the middle of the Gut there. All her crew saving one man got away in the boat. The fellow that was left lay drunk in the cabin. A sea shifted her cargo; shortly after she capsized and went down. A few days later, that same ship floated up from the bottom of the sea on to the shore near Tangier. She was boarded, and they found the man alive in the cabin.’

‘What was the vessel’s cargo, Mr. Prance?’ inquired little Saunders.

‘Oil and brandy, sir.’

‘Don’t you think,’ exclaimed Mr. Johnson, ‘that your story is one that would be very acceptable to the marines, Mr. Prance, but that would not be believed by your sailors were you to tell it to them?’

Here the captain, who had been slowly coming forward, accompanied by half-a-dozen ladies, interrupted us.

‘Mr. Prance.’

‘Sir?’

‘That object yonder is a danger in the way of navigation. I think it would be kind in us to send a shot at it.’

‘Ay, ay, sir.’

‘We will shift the helm,’ continued old Keeling, in the skewered, buttoned-up sort of voice and air he was wont to use when addressing his mates in the presence of the passengers, ‘so as to bring the wreck within reach of our carronades.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘I expect,’ continued old marline-spike, ‘that she is floating on the air in her hold rather than on her cargo, even though it be cork; and if we can knock a hole in her, she will sink.’

Mr. Prance stepped aft to the wheel, and the vessel’s course was changed. Instructions went forward; and the boatswain, who combined with his duties the functions of chief-gunner aboard the _Countess Ida_, superintended the loading of a couple of pieces.

‘Please tell me when they are going to fire, Mr. Riley, that I may stop my ears,’ cried Miss Hudson, who looked a very lovely little woman that morning in a wide straw hat and a body of some muslin-like material, through which the snow of her throat and neck showed, making you think of a white rose in a crystal vase.

Mr. Greenhew, with a glance full of scissors and thumbscrews, as sailors say, at Mr. Riley, told Miss Hudson that if she objected to the noise, he would insist that the gun should not be fired, and would make it a personal matter between himself and the captain.

‘Not for worlds, thank you very much all the same,’ said Miss Hudson, sending a languishing look at him through her eyelashes; which, being witnessed by Mr. Riley, would, I did not doubt, occasion a large expenditure of sarcasm between the young men later on.

The motion of the ship was very slow, and we had floated almost imperceptibly down upon the wreck. The skipper then suggested that the ladies should go aft, and off they went in a flutter and huddle of many-coloured gowns, Mrs. Colonel Bannister leading the way, and Mrs. Hudson limping in the wake with her fingers in her ears. A chap with a purple face and immense whiskers was sighting the piece.

‘Let fly now, whenever you are ready,’ shouted Mr. Prance.

There was a roaring explosion; Mr. Johnson recoiled on to the feet of Mr. Emmett, who shouted with pain, and went hopping to the skylight with a foot in his hand. There were several screeches from the ladies, and methought the whiskers of the colonel, who stood beside me thirstily looking on, forked out with an added tension of every separate fibre, to the thunder of the gun and the smell of the powder. The ball flew wide.

‘Another shot!’ called out Mr. Prance.

Bang! went the piece. I had my eye on the wreck at that moment, and saw half the stern-post, from which the rudder was gone, and a few feet of the keel to which it was affixed, vanish like a shattered bottle.

‘That’s done it!’ cried old Keeling with excitement as he stood ogling the wreck through his binocular. ‘If a hole that’ll let the air out is to sink her, she’s as good as foundered.’

He had scarcely said this when there was a sudden roar of voices along the whole length of our ship.

‘See! she is full of men!’

‘Heart alive, where are they coming from?’

‘They’re rising as if they were dead bodies, and the last blast was sounding.’

‘What’ll they be? What’ll they be?’

‘Defend us! they must all be afloat in a minute and drowning!’

Fifty exclamations of this kind rolled along the bulwarks, where the sailors had gathered in their full company to watch the effect of the shot. There was no glass within reach of me; but my sight was keen, and at the first blush I believed that the hull had been a slaver, that she had capsized when full of negroes, and that our round-shot had made a man-hole aft big enough for them to escape through. There were twenty or thirty of them. They came thrusting through the aperture with extraordinary agility, and most of them held a very firm seat on the clean line of the keel. But every now and again one or another of them would lose his balance and slide down the hard bright surface of the yellow sheathing upon the round of the bilge plump into the water, where you would observe him making frantic but idle efforts to reclimb the wet and slippery slope.

‘Monkeys, as I am a man!’ roared Mr. Prance.

‘A cargo of monkeys, sir!’ shouted the skipper from the other end of the poop, whilst he kept his glasses levelled at the wreck.

A sort of groaning note of astonishment, followed by a wild shout of laughter, came along from the Jacks. Indeed, one needed to look hard at the thing to believe in it, so incredibly odd was the incident. One moment the wreck was a mere curve of naked yellow sheathing flashing to the sun as it rolled; the next, pouff! went the thunder of the gun, and as though its grinning adamantine lips owned some magical and diabolical potency of invocation, lo! the hole made by the shot was vomiting monkeys, and in a trice the radiant rounds of the keel-up fabric were covered with the figures of squatting, clinging, grinning creatures of all sizes, some like little hairy babies, some like men as large at least as Mr. Saunders.

‘There’ll be a human being rising out of that hole before long, I expect,’ said Mr. Prance. ‘He must needs be slower than the monkeys if he’s a man. How many d’ye make, Mr. Dugdale?’

‘Some thirty or forty,’ said I. ‘But I tell you what, Mr. Prance: there’ll be none left in a few minutes, for the hull is sinking rapidly.’

At that instant Captain Keeling sung out: ‘Mr. Prance--have one of the quarter-boats manned. It is as I thought--the hull was floating on the air in her hold, and she’s settling fast. We can’t let those poor creatures drown. Get the main topsail backed.’

A boat’s crew came bundling aft to the cry of the mate; in a mighty hurry the gripes were cast adrift, and the tackles slackened away with the men in their places, and the fourth officer in the stern sheets shipping the rudder as the boat sank. There was a deal of confusion for the moment, what with the tumbling aft of the sailors, the passengers getting out of their road, the hubbub of ladies’ voices, and the cries of the seamen dragging upon the weather main-braces to back the yards.

‘There she goes!’ cried I; ‘there’ll not be many of the creatures rescued, I believe. Monkeys are indifferent swimmers.’

‘Lively now, Mr. Jenkinson,’ yelled Mr. Prance to the fourth officer, ‘or they’ll all be drowned.’

The chaps gave way with a will, and the boat buzzed towards the patch of little black heads that rose and sank upon the swell as though a sack of cocoa-nuts had been capsized out there. All hands stood gazing in silence. The drowning struggle of a single beast is a pitiful sight; but to see a crowd perishing, a whole mob of brutes horribly counterfeiting the aspect and motions of suffering humanity with their faces and gestures, is painful, and indeed intolerable. The ladies had come to the forward end of the poop out of the way of the seamen pulling upon the main brace, and I found myself next to Miss Temple at the rail.

‘They _are_ monkeys, I suppose?’ she said, swiftly shooting a glance of her black eyes at me, and then staring again seawards with her pale face as passionless as a piece of carving, and nothing to show that she was in the least degree moved by the excitement of the scene of drowning monkeys and speeding boat, saving her parted lips, as though she breathed a little fast.

‘They are as much monkeys,’ said I, ‘as fur and tails can make a creature.’

‘Do you suppose there were living people locked up in that hold?’

‘God forbid!’ said I. ‘It is not a thing to conjecture _now_.’

‘How could those monkeys have lived without air?’

‘Air there must have been, Miss Temple, or they could not have lived. The story of the wreck seems simple enough to my mind. She was, no doubt, a little schooner from the Brazilian coast, bound to a European port with a freight of monkeys, which are always a saleable commodity. They would be stowed away somewhere aft in the run, perhaps, as it is called. The vessel capsized, and floated, as Captain Keeling suggested, upon the air in her. Our cannon-ball knocked a hole in the hulk right over the monkeys’ quarters, and out they came. I can tell you of more wonderful things than that.’

‘She must have _capsized_, as you call it, very recently,’ said she, glancing at me again--it was rarely more than a glance with her, as though she believed that such beauty as her eyes had entitled them to a royal privacy.

‘No doubt,’ I answered.

By this time the boat had reached the spot where the hulk had foundered, and we could see the men lying over the side picking up the monkeys. I ran my gaze eagerly over the surface there, somehow fancying that one or more bodies of men might rise; but there was nothing in that way to be seen. The boat lingered with the fellows in her standing up and looking around them. They then reseated themselves, the oars sparkled, and presently the little fabric came rushing through the water to alongside.

‘How many have you picked up, Mr. Jenkinson!’ cried the mate.

‘Only eight, sir. I believe they were half dead with hunger and thirst, and had no strength to swim, for most of them had sunk before we could approach them.’

‘Hand the poor brutes up.’

Some of the Jacks jumped into the chains to receive the creatures, and they were passed over the rail on to the quarter-deck. Deeply as one might pity the unhappy brutes, it was impossible to look at them with a grave face. One of them was an ape with white whiskers like a frill, and a tuft of hair upon his brow that made the rest of his head look bald. He had lost an eye, but the other blinker was so full of human expression that I found myself shaking with laughter as I watched him. He sat on his hams like a Lascar, gazing up at us with his one eye with a wrinkled and grinning countenance of appeal grotesque beyond the wildest fancies of the caricaturist. There was one pretty little chap with red fur upon his breast like a waistcoat. Some of the creatures, on feeling the warm planks of the deck, lay down in the exact posture of human beings, reposing their heads upon their extended arms and closing their eyes.

‘Bo’sun,’ called Mr. Prance, ‘get those poor beasts forward and have water and food given them. Swing the topsail yard--lee main topsail braces.’

In a few minutes the quarter-deck was clear again, with an ordinary seaman swabbing the wet spaces left by the monkeys, and the ship quietly pushing forwards on her course.