l-y-a quelqu'un a bord! Deux
personnes, et des garcons je crois; mais, ils sont morts!"

"Pas possible," cried the helmsman, showing a little more interest.
"Really?"

"Parbleu, c'est vrai! Vire que nous nous en approchions."

"C'est fait," exclaimed Jacques, now quite as much excited--as the
other, and eager to rescue any one in peril or distress, as every sailor
of every nationality always is--that is, a true sailor. "Starboard it
is!"

"Babord!" cried out Antoine, as the helmsman called him, telling the
latter he was to put the tiller over. "Port."

Jacques replied by a counter order.

"Toi, Antoine," shouted he, "lache la grande voile!" meaning him to
"slacken off the mainsheets," whereupon the lugger was brought alongside
the wreck of the cutter.

Our friend Antoine, without wasting a moment, at once stepped on board,
exclaiming, "Tenez bon dessus--Hold on."

The man was shocked at what he saw, the dead bodies, as he thought, of
Bob and Dick lying across each other on the floor of the little cabin,
half in and half out of which the boys were exposed to his view at the
first glance.

"Pauvres garcons!" he cried in a husky voice, wiping away a tear that
sprang unbidden to his eye, with the characteristic ready emotional
sympathy of his countrymen. "Pauvres garcons."

Jacques, who was a little longer in coming to inspect the derelict,
hearing what his companion said, called out for further information.

"De quel pays sont-ils?" he asked. "Can you tell their nationality?"

"Anglais, sans doute!" was his reply. "Je le crois par leur air."

This made Jacques prick up his ears.

"Comment?" said he; and, without waiting to hear anything else he, too,
jumped down into the boat. "Anglais? Mon Dieu!"

Jacques was a man of common-sense; so, instead of contenting himself
with staring at the apparently lifeless boys, as Antoine did, he bent
down to see whether they yet breathed.

"Bete! Quant aux enfants, ils ne sont pas plus morts que toi ou moi!"
he sang out indignantly. "You fool! The boys are no more dead than you
or me."

But Jacques was a kind-hearted man as well as one possessed of common-
sense.

So, under his directions, he and Antoine between them transshipped the
apparently lifeless but still animate forms of Bob and Dick from the
wrecked cutter into the fo'c's'le of the lugger, where a charcoal, fire
was smouldering in a small stove on which simmered a saucepan containing
something