ned but little nautical experience. He was,
however, very sick, while he arrived at the conclusion that the tender's
hold, the dark prison in which he found himself, was a most horrible
place.

Several of his more heartless companions jeered at him in his misery;
and, indeed, poor Bill, thin and pale, shoeless and hatless, clad in
patched garments, looked a truly miserable object.

As the wind was fair, the voyage did not last long, and glad enough he
was when the cutter got alongside the big frigate, and he with the rest
being ordered on board, he could breathe the fresh air which blew across
her decks.

Tom Fletcher, who stood next to Bill, had considerably the advantage of
him in outward appearance. Tom was dressed in somewhat nautical
fashion, though any sailor would have seen with half an eye that his
costume had been got up by a shore-going tailor.

Tom had a good-natured but not very sensible-looking countenance. He
was strongly built, was in good health, and had the making of a sailor
in him, though this was the first time that he had even been on board a
ship.

He had a short time before come off with a party of men returning on the
expiration of their leave. Telling them that he wished to go to sea, he
had been allowed to enter the boat. From the questions some of them had
put to him, and the answers he gave, they suspected that he was a
runaway, and such in fact was the case. Tom was the son of a solicitor
in a country town, who had several other boys, he being the fourth, in
the family.

He had for some time taken to reading the voyages of Drake, Cavendish,
and Dampier, and the adventures of celebrated pirates, such as those of
Captains Kidd, Lowther, Davis, Teach, as also the lives of some of
England's naval commanders, Sir Cloudesley Shovell, Benbow, and Admirals
Hawke, Keppel, Rodney, and others, whose gallant actions he fully
intended some day to imitate.

He had made vain endeavours to induce his father to let him go to sea,
but Mr Fletcher, knowing that he was utterly ignorant of a sea life,
set his wish down as a mere fancy which it would be folly to indulge.

Tom, instead of trying to show that he really was in earnest, took
French leave one fine morning, and found his way to Portsmouth, without
being traced. Had he waited, he would probably have been sent to sea as
a midshipman, and placed on the quarter-deck. He now entered as a
ship-boy before the mast.

Tom, as he had made his