those who had just expressed the
strongest sympathy in her loss. "Was he a man that had the air of a
sneaking runaway?"

"As for his head-piece, I will not engage to give very true account,"
returned the old mariner though he had the look of one who had been kept a
good deal of his time, in the lee scuppers. If should give an opinion, the
poor devil has had too much"--

"Idle time, you would say; yes, yes; it has been his misfortune to be out
of work a good deal latterly and wickedness has got into his head, for
want of something better to think of. Too much"--

"Wife," interrupted the old man, emphatically. Another general, and far
less equivocal laugh, at the expense of Desire, succeeded this blunt
declaration Nothing intimidated by such a manifest assent to the opinion
of the hardy seaman, the undaunted virago resumed,--

"Ah! you little know the suffering and forbearance I have endured with the
man in so many long years. Had the fellow you met the look of one who had
left an injured woman behind him?"

"I can't say there was any thing about him which said, in so many words,
that the woman he had left at her moorings was more or less injured;"
returned the tar, with commendable discrimination, "but there was enough
about him to show, that, however and wherever he may have stowed his wife,
if wife she was, he had not seen fit to leave all her outfit at home. The
man had plenty of female toggery around his neck; I suppose he found it
more agreeable than her arms."

"What!" exclaimed Desire, looking aghast; "has he dared to rob me! What
had he of mine? not the gold beads!"

"I'll not swear they were no sham."

"The villain!" continued the enraged termagant, catching her breath like a
person that had just been submerged in water longer than is agreeable to
human nature, and forcing her way through the crowd, with such vigour as
soon to be in a situation to fly to her secret hordes, in order to
ascertain the extent of her misfortune; "the sacrilegious villain! to rob
the wife of his bosom, the mother of his own children, and"--

"Well, well," again interrupted the landlord of the 'Foul Anchor,' with
his unseasonable voice, "I never before heard the good-man suspected of
roguery, though the neighbourhood was ever backward in calling him
chicken-hearted."

The old seaman looked the publican full in the face, with much meaning in
his eye, as he answered,--

"If the honest tailor never robbed any but that virago,