st of
'em was! If a Frenchman met her he'd, likely, have the cargo out of her,
swearing it was meant to aid and comfort the English; and if a Spaniard
or a Dutchman met her--they was hanging on to England's coat-tails
too--Lord only knows what _they_ wouldn't do! It came over me that what
I wanted in my tobacco trade was a fast-sailing ship and a man who could
be French, English, or American at a pinch. Luckily I could lay my hands
on both articles. So along towards the end of September in the year '99
I sailed from Philadelphia with a hundred and eleven hogshead o' good
Virginia tobacco, in the brig _Berthe Aurette_ named after mother's
maiden name, hoping 'twould bring me luck, which she didn't--and yet she
did.'

'Where was you bound for?' Puck asked.

'Er--any port I found handiest. I didn't tell Toby or the Brethren. They
don't understand the inns and outs of the tobacco trade.'

Puck coughed a small cough as he shifted a piece of wood with his bare
foot.

'It's easy for you to sit and judge,' Pharaoh cried. 'But think o' what
_we_ had to put up with! We spread our wings and run across the broad
Atlantic like a hen through a horse-fair. Even so, we was stopped by an
English frigate, three days out. He sent a boat alongside and pressed
seven able seamen. I remarked it was hard on honest traders, but the
officer said they was fighting all creation and hadn't time to argue.
The next English frigate we escaped with no more than a shot in our
quarter. Then we was chased two days and a night by a French privateer,
firing between squalls, and the dirty little English ten-gun brig which
made him sheer off had the impudence to press another five of our men.
That's how we reached to the chops of the Channel. Twelve good men
pressed out of thirty-five; an eighteen-pound shot-hole close besides
our rudder; our mainsail looking like spectacles where the Frenchman had
hit us--and the Channel crawling with short-handed British cruisers. Put
_that_ in your pipe and smoke it next time you grumble at the price of
tobacco!

'Well, then, to top it off, while we was trying to get at our leaks, a
French lugger come swooping at us out o' the dusk. We warned him to keep
away, but he fell aboard us, and up climbed his jabbering red-caps. We
couldn't endure any more--indeed we couldn't. We went at 'em with all we
could lay hands on. It didn't last long. They was fifty odd to our
twenty-three. Pretty soon I heard the cutlasses thrown d