part I knew no more about than the table, when her father broke out

describing him as warmly as possible; and suddenly Miss Hyde looked at him with a little turn of her pretty lip, and a twinkle in her eye, that sent the old gentleman fiddling about his coffee-cup, and stopped him in a moment as if she had been a little witch!'

"'What's to be done, Tom?' I faltered out, after a long stop. 'I'm sure I don't know, Ned,' said he gravely; 'let's go on deck at any rate, for it's too hot here to sleep.' The moment the sight of the calm burst upon us, however, with the two vessels together in the midst of it, in the hazy sort of moonlight, the same notion seemed to strike both of us in a different way. 'I'll tell you what, Collins,' said Westwood, half-jokingly, half in earnest, 'uncle though he be, if you can contrive to cut out the Councillor anyhow, I'll forgive you, for one!' 'How, though--_how_, by Jove!' replied I--'if they go to Bombay in the Indiaman, by the time they reach Calcutta, I shall be in the Pacific!' ''Tis a difficult case,' said Westwood, 'no doubt. And even suppose you had the opportunity, 'twould be hard to manage an elopement ashore in India, travelling "dauk" in two palanquins. Seriously speaking, Ned, I see nothing for it but to wait till you come _back_ from the Pacific.'

"I looked hopelessly round: the calm and heat together gave one a helpless feeling, and every notion of an active sort appeared desperate. A perfect calm it was, too: there was some filmy scum of a haze aloft, that served to spread the moonlight all over, shutting out the shape of the sky, and softening off the horizon; with the moon standing slant up in it, like a brighter spot, and a few stars low down in the east. But for the long wide tremble of the water, in fact, as it glanced up with a blue flicker, you'd have fancied we mightn't be far from land; while the big Indiaman lay off the schooner's bow, without the least motion one could see; the moonshine edging round her spars and ropes from the other side, and her sails hanging shadowy against it, except below, under her brailed-up courses, where the masts, the thick of the rigging, and the tops of her deck-lumber, glistened as if they were newly wet. Half of her watch were on the bowsprit, sending out a 'fished' spritsail-yard, the same we had set dangling about their ears that afternoon, and we could hear them speaking plain enough; every time they sang out at a haul, it went far away on all sides--ho-ho-ho-he-ho-ho-o--till you lost it in the dead calm, as if somebody had gone there. Now and then the _Seringapatam_ made a slight plunge by the head, as the wide soft swell floated up with her; and the glossy black shadow, that seemingly gave her hull the height of a tower, came wavering in quicksilver circles to our very cutwater, while the lights from her after-windows went twisting away round her heavy counter to the moonshine, like yellow snakes; the schooner all the time lying as quiet as if she were on a pond, except that by little and little she kept shifting her bearings to the Indiaman, and things were confoundedly like our both sticking together in course of the morning, if the calm held. I went forward to the forecastle and desired Jones to get all hands down into the boats, and have her towed off to safe distance, seeing that the worst of it would be sure to fall to our share.

"This was doing, and we drew slowly off the ship's bow, where her men coolly knocked off working to watch ours, and pass jokes on our gang of Lascars, as they handled the oars in awkward style; in fact, by the way the Indiaman's watch carried on, most of them seemed to have passed the grog-can pretty freely, being Saturday night, which we could hear they were still keeping up below in the forecastle, when our quarter came abreast of her larboard bow. 'Hurrah!' said one, waving his tarpaulin; and 'Pull, you beggars!' roared another; when my old customer, ugly Harry, all at once leant out of her fore-chains, and sung out to Jones, who was next him in the stern-sheets of our gig: 'I say, mate, so ye're clearing off, are ye? The better for that 'ere nutshell of a schooner o' yours, I reckon!' Jones made no answer, and the fellow added; 'Come aboard when you've got a safe berth, anyhow, and drink "sweethearts and wives," will ye?' I saw Jones start, and turn his face fiercely into the shadow of the ship's main-course on the water, rising half-up with one fist clenched, but he said nothing. 'Oh, you're blasted proud!' Foster called out: 'you forgets a man, blow me! D'ye think I doesn't know a fellow I got glorious with myself, in old Van Stinkoff's, at Cape Town? Sink me, mates,' said he, as loud as before, turning round on the rail of the bulwarks to the rest, 'I picked him out o' the street scuppers, under the sign of the Flying Dutchman, an' I'm blowed if I didn't think it beneath me at the time!' Here the end of our main-boom opened us in sight of the ugly ruffian, and he was sinking down in-board, when I hailed the Indiaman's quarter-deck, where the Scotch mate was to be seen. 'Ay, ay, the schooner ahoay!' sung out he, coming to the gangway. 'Did you hear that man's impertinence, sir,' said I sternly, 'to my officer on duty there? I expect you to see him punished, sir.' The Scotchman said he'd inquire into it; but shortly after he came back, saying he 'doubted' he couldn't be sure of the man; and, at any rate, he could have 'meant no ill.' The boats had towed us by this time almost out of fair hearing, but Harry Foster was to be seen coolly eyeing us from the midst of his watchmates, as he slung a couple of blocks over his shoulder; when he turned away with as much indifference as if we had been a Thames collier, growling some two or three words or other that brought a loud laugh from the Indiaman's forecastle to her bowsprit, where the men were turning lazily to their business again.

"Being now clear off the ship, with the rake of her hull in our command if I chose, and free of her broadside at the same time, I hailed the boats to leave off towing and come aboard. As Jones came on deck, I saw that in his face to make me think he took the thing to heart, seeing he met my first look with his lips set together and a steady gleam of his eyes. The truth was, I never in my life came across a man that struck me so much with the notion of his having a devil in him, seeking to get the better of what was good.

"'I think we shall do, Mr Jones?' I said. 'Quite safe, sir,' said he, quietly; at that moment, standing as we did out of earshot, with the setting moon in sight past the Indiaman, shining in a rusty yellow glare to her hanging sails, 'twas strange how the odds of our different stations passed off. We were foot to foot, in fact; I was fully aware, if never before, what an enemy Jones would make--he had great daring and knowingness in him, and all on the wrong side of the hedge for me at the time, seeing I had such a ticklish part to play with the Indiaman. I caught myself, on the instant, measuring youth and activity, not to say regular breeding to the service, and a clear conscience besides, against him and his thews and sinews; but as for turning and twisting with the man before me, I saw it was the tack likely to throw him to windward of me. My voice changed, and I lowered it as I said: 'Mr Jones, I happened to sail half the voyage as a passenger in that ship, and I've no common reason to be anxious about her getting safe into port. There's one single being in her at this moment I'd willingly lose my life to save from anything like what one could fancy--ay, so help me God, suppose I'd no chance of ever setting eyes on her again!' Jones never stirred a feature, but looked past me into the gleam of the moon over my shoulder.

"'Well, Mr Jones,' I said, 'I'll acknowledge to you frankly, as from one seaman to another, the question is, Are you for me--or _not_?' 'We speak as man with man, it seems, Mr Collins!' said Jones quietly; 'then I am--_for_ you!' and he struck his hand all at once into mine; 'here's a hand that never lied, whatever the tongue may have done--bad or good; I am for you, sir, and no more of it! I knew as well as if you'd told me, Mr Collins, by the looks of the passengers, that you had sailed aboard that ship in some way or other--and what's more, sir, I _saw_----' here he stopped, looking at me with his back to the sinking gleam of light beyond the ship's hull, from the moon as she touched the water, and I saw nothing but the shape of his head under the straw hat, with a shadow blurring his face together, though I felt him eyeing me out of it all the time--'what some would think more worth while than if you were a Spanish plate-ship,' he went on; and he lowered his voice nearly to a whisper as he added, 'I tell you what, Mr Collins, 'tis my conviction that, _if you chose_, you might do what you liked in the end with that Indiaman and _all_ aboard her!' I stepped back with a shiver through me, as the sudden setting of the moon blended everything black in with Jones's shoulders, leaving his head instead of her against a glimmer of light, till for a moment it seemed peering at me off the horizon with the whole lump of shadow betwixt the two craft for a body; and I must say I thought of old stories about the Tempter in human form. 'Devil!' said I hoarsely, while the last gleam to westward went out, and it got so dark I could have fancied Jones had vanished from the bulwarks without stirring a foot; in fact, on my moving to the place I touched the cool planks with my hand--he was actually gone! Nothing was visible beyond our own decks, save a slight glimmer such as one would make in sculling with a single oar; and I saw at once he had taken the small boat alongside to go aboard the Indiaman! All the rest was that thick heavy darkness only to be found in a calm in the Indian Ocean, towards morning: you may not only say you see it, but could stir it, as it were, with a stick.

"A horrid notion of Jones's purpose crept through my mind at first; but on second thoughts I easily saw this wasn't the occasion for him to choose, if he had really meant ill, and accordingly there was more the reason to trust him. Indeed, as I stood listening and watching, after Westwood and the planter went below, the Indiaman's binnacle lamp seemed to go slowly out, while at the same time the sound of her watch speaking on the forecastle apparently got distincter, till I could hear them clear of the ship's hull and rigging, like low voices muttering in the air betwixt her and us. 'Twas only her having sheered gradually bow-on to the schooner again, however, as a calm near the equator has always something like a _pulse_ in it--but it struck me there were men out on her jib-boom, which being of course the very privatest part of any in a ship for talk--why, to find more than one going out there, of a dark night, and with no work to do, never looks otherwise than suspicious. Nothing of this kind surprised me at present in the _Seringapatam_, with the opinion I had of her; but the curious thing was, that the fellows must have supposed it the farthest point they could get out of sight of us, as well as from their own decks, she having had her beam to the schooner when the moon set.

"The desperate feelings that steal upon a man in such a case, and the fearful notions that breed in his head, with the quickness of his senses and the way he holds on by a single rope, you can scarcely conceive, though if a cry had come from the Indiaman at that moment I daresay I should have sprung in head foremost to get to her, when all at once, from up in the air again, I thought I heard the smart click of a flint and steel; at any rate, I saw the sparks showering from it in the midst of the black space before me--even the pair of fists as they knocked together, then a mouth blowing the match, till there was a light in a lantern between four heads leaning towards each other over the spar. Queer enough it would have been to see, in ordinary circumstances, but you'll readily fancy what a thing it looked all of a sudden, right out in the midst of the pitch-black night, one didn't know how or where--in fact, two of them faced each other in the stream of light from one side of the lantern, like the two edges of a rent in the dark, and another was like a sprawling blot in the centre--you just saw they were faces and heads, with a foot or two of the thick round boom slanting up betwixt them; but as for their bodies, they were all of a piece with the perfect blackness beyond. I could see one of them hold up the lantern and pass it round the three others' faces, bringing out their chins and noses, as if to be sure who they were--a piece of caution which served almost equally well for me, for I remembered each of them by headmark amongst the crew, only I didn't see the said fellow himself, even when he drew out some paper or other in one hand, seemingly unfolded it with the help of his teeth, and spread it over the jib-boom under the lantern, whereupon the whole four of the heads drew close together in a black lump round the light, peering down upon the paper, and muttering away as much at their ease, no doubt, as if they'd been in a tap-room. All I wished for was a good rifle-barrel in my hand at the time, to have knocked the light out from the midst of them, and sent the bullet by accident through the tarpaulin hat behind it--especially when a glaring red flipper was shoved out on the white paper, and the thumb planted steadily on a particular spot. All at once, however, the light was put out in the lantern, and I heard them going in-board, as the noise of the morning watch being called, at four o'clock, got up round the forehatchway.