ARE INTRODUCED TO THE READER--THE CAPTAIN MAKES
INSANE RESOLUTIONS, FIGHTS A BATTLE, AND CONQUERS.

In the centre of the town whose name we have declined to communicate,
there stood a house--a small house--so small that it might have been
more appropriately, perhaps, styled a cottage. This house had a
yellow-painted face, with a green door in the middle, which might have
been regarded as its nose, and a window on each side thereof, which
might have been considered its eyes. Its nose was, as we have said,
painted green, and its eyes had green Venetian eyelids, which were half
shut at the moment Captain Dunning walked up to it as if it were calmly
contemplating that seaman's general appearance.

There was a small garden in front of the house, surrounded on three
sides by a low fence. Captain Dunning pushed open the little gate,
walked up to the nose of the house, and hit it several severe blows with
his knuckles. The result was that the nose opened, and a servant-girl
appeared in the gap.

"Is your mistress at home?" inquired the captain.

"Guess she is--both of 'em!" replied the girl.

"Tell both of 'em I'm here, then," said the captain, stepping into the
little parlour without further ceremony; "and is my little girl in?"

"Yes, she's in."

"Then send her here too, an' look alive, lass." So saying, Captain
Dunning sat down on the sofa, and began to beat the floor with his right
foot somewhat impatiently.

In another second a merry little voice was heard in the passage, the
door burst open, a fair-haired girl of about ten years of age sprang
into the room, and immediately commenced to strangle her father in a
series of violent embraces.

"Why, Ailie, my darling, one would think you had not seen me for fifty
years at least," said the captain, holding his daughter at arm's-length,
in order the more satisfactorily to see her.

"It's a whole week, papa, since you last came to see me," replied the
little one, striving to get at her father's neck again, "and I'm sure it
seems to me like a hundred years at least."

As the child said this she threw her little arms round her father, and
kissed his large, weather-beaten visage all over--eyes, mouth, nose,
chin, whiskers, and, in fact, every attainable spot. She did it so
vigorously, too, that an observer would have been justified in expecting
that her soft, delicate cheeks would be lacerated by the rough contact;
but they were not. The result was a heightening