for the most part with
Woodrow the old mariner, plying him with questions innumerable
about shipping and life at sea, and learning many things by my own
observation. I saw no more of Vetch, nor did anything give me cause
of uneasiness. On the second day Mistress Perry, indeed, threatened
a slight discomfort by wishing me to share my room with a new
lodger she had just taken; but she gave in when I flatly refused to
bed with a stranger, and grumblingly accommodated the man--a
rough-looking sea dog--in a little closet off the stairs.

On the third afternoon, when I returned to the quay after my
dinner, Woodrow told me he had found a skipper who would sail for
Southampton at the end of the week, and was willing to take me as
ship's boy. He assured me that I could hope for nothing better to
begin with, and the voyage would be long enough for me to try my
sea legs, and, as he believed, to cure me of my fancy for a sea
life. I was to visit the skipper at the Angel tavern that evening,
and if he liked my figurehead, as Woodrow put it, the matter could
be settled there and then.

Accordingly, about seven o'clock, I met Woodrow at the corner of
the Bridge, by the Leather Hall, and accompanied him to the Angel
in Redcliffe Street, where he presented me to his friend, Captain
Reddaway. After the usual jocose allusions to my height, to which I
was now fairly inured, the skipper asked me a great many questions
about navigation, feigned a vast surprise at my ignorance, and
supplied the answers himself, to impress me, I suppose, with his
own stores of knowledge.

Then the two mariners settled down over their pipes and beer to a
conversation in which I was not expected to take a part; indeed, it
consisted chiefly of reminiscences of voyages they had made
together, and, though entertaining enough at first, by and by
became insufferably tedious. For politeness' sake they included me
in the conversation from time to time by waving their pipes at me,
and I did not like to risk hurting the feelings of my new employer
by showing how wearied I was, or by leaving them; so that it was
not till near ten o'clock that I managed to escape, and then only
because they had both fallen asleep.

The night was warm, and my lungs being filled with the reek of
their strong tobacco I determined to walk down by the river before
returning to my lodging, in the hope of getting a breath of fresh
air blowing in from the sea. The river side was deserted and