" replied the captain. "I see."

Just then, Mr Jellaby, who had gone forward in the meantime to see if
there were any traces there of the accident, returned aft, looking more
serious than I had ever seen him before.

"His head struck against one of the flukes of the sheet-anchor, sir," he
reported to Captain Farmer who had sent him on the errand. "The bill of
it, just abaft the fore-rigging to port, is now spattered with the poor
little chap's brains. I wonder nobody observed it before, sir."

"He would, therefore, have been killed instantly and did not suffer any
pain," said the captain. "Poor young fellow, poor young fellow! He was
a most promising lad and always smart at his duty!"

"Trim sails!" cried out the commander at this juncture, in a voice husky
with emotion; as if anxious to hide his feelings, now that the captain
had pronounced his requiem to the memory of our late shipmate. "Brace
up the mainyard!"

At once our sails filled, when the ship was put upon her course again;
and, the watch being then set, we all went below, the boatswain piping
the hands down to supper, for it was nearly Three Bells and more than an
hour after the usual time for that meal.

Naturally everybody in the gunroom was full of the accident, the fellows
all thinking more of poor Dick Popplethorne when dead, for the moment at
least, than they had ever done while he was living; and I, myself, could
not help remembering the strange coincidence of his laughing over Mr
Jellaby's yarn about the marine as we were sailing down Channel only a
few days before and being especially merry over the young sentry's
mistake in calling out "Dead boy" when the bell struck.

Poor chap, he was a dead boy now, indeed; although, he had been alive
and as hearty and jolly as any of us that very afternoon down there at
dinner in the mess.

It was almost incredible to recollect this! "I have just calculated,"
observed Mr Stormcock amidst the general talk about our late messmate,
as if stating a most important fact, "that the youngster fell overboard
in latitude 48 degrees north, pretty nearly, and longitude 8 degrees 10
minutes west--a trifle to the westward of where we met that confounded
Frenchman."

"I don't see how that information can be of any use to his friends,
Stormcock," said Mr Fortescue Jones, with a coarse laugh. "We can't
very well put up a tombstone over him in the Bay of Biscay."

"For shame, sir!" exclaimed little Tom Mills, w