part I was now playing not to be ready. ‘Satchell, sir.

‘Where do they live?’

‘At Hobart Town.’

‘What’s their address, boy?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I’ll find out when I arrive.’

The doctor grinned gravely.

‘“Arrive!”’ cried the captain. ‘How do you know I’ll allow you to arrive, as you call it? “Arrive,” you monkey! You’ve committed a felony; you’ve broken into private premises; for all I can tell, you may have broached the cargo of the ship. There are men in that prison down there,’ said he, pointing to the main-hatch, ‘who are being transported for life for smaller crimes.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I would do nothing wrong. I will gladly pay for my passage with my labour if you will give me work--such work as I can do.’

The doctor put his hand on the commander’s arm and whispered in his ear. Captain Barrett exclaimed: ‘If you’re satisfied with the lad’s account of himself, Captain Sutherland, he shall wait upon me, if you like.’

‘What work have you for two servants?’ exclaimed the doctor.

‘I like his pluck, d’ye know,’ answered Captain Barrett, ‘and just now he happens to be rather friendless, Ellice.’

The doctor looked annoyed and walked to the rail.

‘Where do you come from?’ asked the commander.

‘London, sir.’

‘Who are your people?’ Again I hung my head.

‘He is in the right to look ashamed,’ said the doctor. ‘Take it that he has brought great grief and distress upon a respectable family by his mysterious disappearance. I don’t believe for a moment,’ continued he, eyeing me sternly, ‘that he has friends at Hobart Town. It’s just an ordinary runaway case. He may have robbed some kind employer--perhaps defrauded his own father. His clothes are new and good. Where did you get the money to buy these clothes with?’ he asked. I kept my head hung. ‘Lads of your sort,’ he continued, ‘get hold of cheap romancing works--vile, lying fictions--books which represent Jack Sheppard as a greater man than Wellington. Little by little they advance till they end there,’ said he, pointing, as Captain Sutherland had, to the main-hatch. ‘Down there, weighted with irons, branded as criminals, leaving their native country for ever, expelled by the just laws of an outraged community, are many men who have begun as you have begun--nay, who may have started on their downward career with a great deal more of modesty than you have exhibited.’

Captain Barrett let his eye-glass fall, whistled softly and lounged aft to the wheel.

All this while the decks had remained comparatively deserted. Just at this moment a boatswain’s mate tuned up his whistle, and a number of seamen came out of the forecastle and went to work in various parts of the ship forward. The doctor continued to lecture me; but I was looking at the strange, grim scene of decks and did not heed him. You would have thought, at sight of the barricades, that the ship was full of wild beasts; that man-eating and ravening creatures took the air in the space inclosed by the savage, iron-studded, bristling fence work.

Suddenly, the sentry at the main-hatch stiffened his figure, as though to a sudden call to attention. He guarded a door at the extremity of a short wooden passage, broad enough to allow one person to pass through at a time. A man clothed as a convict stepped through this door. On perceiving him the doctor broke off, and went to the brass poop rail and overhung it, gazing eagerly. A second and a third convict appeared, then a fourth; this man held a fiddle in one hand and a bow in the other.

And now I heard a sound of heavy clanking footfalls, as though a long end of chain cable was being dragged along the deck, and one after another, to the number of perhaps seventy or eighty, issued the convicts, every man, saving the first four, wearing iron rings and chains upon his ankles, the chains triced up to the waist. They were clothed in the same garb I had observed on board the _Warrior_; a dingy sort of gray striped with red and a kind of Scotch cap. The convicts who had led the way cried out sharply: they delivered their orders fast and fierce, like a drill-sergeant savage with yokel recruits. The fellows ranked themselves into a line with something of the discipline of soldiers; then the fellow who held the fiddle put it into his neck and began to screw out a march.

‘Attention! Left turn!’ shouted one of the unshackled convicts. ‘Quick march!’

The fiddle played, and away stepped the line of men, all keeping time to the music, faltering but a little to the movement of the ship, and their irons clanked and their chains rattled as they tramped.

I lost all sense of my situation when I saw those convicts. I made a step to the side of the doctor, and my eyes seemed on fire as I gazed. Tom was not one of them. I guessed that this was a gang brought up to exercise and take the air according to the notions of Doctor Russell-Ellice. It sickened my heart, but it made my spirit mad to witness those wretches marching round and round within the wild-beast-like enclosure, to listen to the mocking squeak of the fiddle threading the dull metallic tramp of the ironed felons, to feel that Tom was one of them and amongst them below, ironed as they were, apparelled and disciplined as they were, guarded by soldiers with loaded muskets--himself as innocent as I, as the dark-eyed doctor beside me, as the commander of the ship, who appeared to have forgotten me in watching this strange march of felons clanking round and round to the tune of the fiddle.

‘That’s my idea,’ said the doctor to the captain. ‘That’s the way to keep them in health. You may judge by their manner of marching that they enjoy the music.’

The captain looked at his second mate and smiled sarcastically. Another person had by this time arrived on the poop; he, like Captain Barrett, was attired in undress uniform. I afterward learned that he was Lieutenant Chimmo, one of the two officers in charge of the guard. They approached and looked hard at me--so hard that I imagined Captain Barrett had divined my sex. Their observation won the attention of Captain Sutherland, by whom I had been unheeded whilst he watched the convicts. He said: ‘Get you down there to leeward and wait till you’re wanted.’ He spoke sternly, but almost in the same breath of his speech his face relaxed, and he exclaimed: ‘Are you famished!’

‘No, sir.’

The doctor shrugged his shoulders, as though vexed that the captain should pity me.

‘Get you down to leeward,’ repeated the commander; and I went and stood at the rail.

Will was aloft in the mizzen-top and the other apprentice in the ratlines of the mizzen shrouds at work there. I looked up at Will, who kissed his hand. The act was boyish and indiscreet, and I averted my face, for I did not then know he was not to be seen from the other side of the poop.

The clear wind was sweet and refreshing after my many hours of confinement. I glanced over the side and watched the feather-white swirl of cloudy foam; the yeast burst in a rainbow splendour from the bow and raced astern in ridges of snow, and I saw the spreading wake of the flying ship dancing miles distant in the airy green that ran in a twinkling horizon round the sky. Far ahead slanted a sail, and far abeam to leeward was a dash of dusky-red canvas, whence I concluded that the coast was not very remote.

The tramping convicts marched round and round in single file to the tune of the fiddle. Some of them were little more than boys, eighteen or twenty years of age, and one or two of them were gray-haired men. Their dress was so levelling, and it seemed besides to stamp so strong an impression of rascality upon their faces, that one could not look at the ironed gang without supposing them all rogues and criminals of the worst sort. And yet I’d fancy, as they came facing aft toward the poop, I could see some countenances which would have passed in the streets and in company for comely, honest faces. But the general type was very villainous; the brow low, overhanging, and scowling: the eye small, deep-set, and restless; the mouth coarse and heavy, and the jaw strong, thick, defined like a beast’s.

My eye rested upon one man. I was certain I had seen him before. He was immensely broad-shouldered, pitted with small-pox. His arms were too long for his body, and the thickness of them and the fists were a giant’s. His eyebrows were black; his eyes a deep and fiery black; his nose coarse, spread, flat and heavy at the nostrils. He had the look of a Jew, and after I had watched him a little while, I said to myself: ‘Yes, now I remember. He is Barney Abram, the prize-fighter, who was under sentence of transportation for life in Newgate when I visited Tom in that jail with Uncle Johnstone.’

I craved to see my sweetheart. I waited for the hideous fiddle to cease squeaking, and for the gang to go below and a second gang to take its place, hoping that Tom might be one in this second gang. I say I waited. Rather, I stood hoping. Why they kept me waiting down to leeward on that poop I could not imagine. I guessed it would shock me horribly to see Tom with irons on, marching in convict’s attire, a mere machine at the will of warders, themselves convicts; yet did I passionately wish to see him that I might make sure he was on board, for though I never dreamt that Will had mistook, still I yearned to satisfy myself with my own eyesight. But the gang continued to march round and round to the strains of the fiddle. Oh, the mockery of the blithe Irish tune the fellow played, timed by the metallic tramp of felons on the echoing deck!