g close alongside. She
barely reached up to the Eagle's bulwarks; she would just about make a
long-boat for her--"

"If she was a good deal smaller," said his father, drily, completing the
sentence for him, as he went over and placed the chart upon the top of
the small cupboard in the corner.

Gjert began then, addressing himself to his mother, to support his
assertion by a comparison of the height out of the water of the
schooner's hull and of the corvette's, by assuring her that the vane at
her mast-head had not reached higher than the man-of-war's mainyard,
&c., but he was interrupted by his father--

"What song was that you were singing out there?"

"Oh, it was the one about the flogging cruise."

"It really was one then?" said the pilot, with a searching look at his
son. He did not easily give credence to gossip of the kind.

To be addressed by his father in this interested tone was highly
flattering to Gjert's self-love. It was this, in fact, that he had been
eager all the time to tell them about; and he burst out now with the
deepest conviction in his manner--

"That it was, father! Some say six, others nine; but that they were all
flogged within an inch of their lives and put in irons down in the
Mediterranean is as certain as--as," he looked about him eagerly here
for something that should be duly emphatic, and when no other more
striking illustration suggested itself, had to wind up finally with this
rather lame one--"as that the cuckoo is standing up there on the clock."

The intelligence had the effect of bringing his mother to a seat, with
the plate on her lap, while she looked apprehensively from her son to
her husband. There was nothing, however, in the aspect of the latter to
justify her apprehension.

"Who did you hear this from, Gjert?" she asked.

"Who did I hear it from? From everybody."

But bethinking him then that in his incredulous home "everybody" would
be reckoned about as valuable an authority as "nobody," he continued--

"From Frederick Beck. He had talked himself with one of the sailors who
was in charge of the officers' gig down by the landing-stairs while his
chief was on shore; and that wasn't all he heard, but a lot of other
queer things besides." Here he looked round him evidently with a
satisfied feeling that he must have convinced them this time at any
rate.

"He seems to have been a credible kind of a chap, that sailor," observed
his father with a mild irony, which es