e Captain continued, after a short silence, "and a heavy
sea, about mid-channel off Dieppe. We sighted a French fishing-boat
yawing about abandoned. Something queer about her, the skipper thought.
Those were queer times in France. We hailed her, and getting no answer
put out a boat and boarded her. There was nobody on board but a woman
and a child. Woman was half mad with fear. I have seen many afraid, but
never one like that. I was only a boy myself, but I remember thinking it
wasn't the sea and drowning she was afraid of. We couldn't find out the
smack's name. It had been painted out with a tar-brush, and she was half
full of water. The skipper took the woman and child off, and left the
fishing-smack as we found her yawing about--all sail set. They reckoned
she would founder in a few minutes. But there was one old man on board,
the boatswain, who had seen many years at sea, who said that she wasn't
making any water at all, because he had been told to look for the leak
and couldn't find it. He said that the water had been pumped into her
so as to waterlog her; and it was his belief that she had not been
abandoned many minutes, that the crew were hanging about somewhere near
in a boat waiting to see if we sighted her and put men on board."

Mr. Dormer Colville was attending to the claret, and pressed Captain
Clubbe by a gesture of the hand to empty his glass.

"Something wrong somewhere?" he suggested, in a conversational way.

"By daylight we were ramping up channel with three French men-of-war
after us," was Captain Clubbe's comprehensive reply. "As chance had it,
the channel squadron hove in sight round the Foreland, and the Frenchmen
turned and left us."

Clubbe marked a pause in his narrative by a glass of claret taken at one
draught like beer.

"Skipper was a Farlingford man, name of Doy," he continued. "Long as he
lived he was pestered by inquiries from the French government respecting
a Dieppe fishing-smack supposed to have been picked up abandoned at sea.
He had picked up no fishing-smack, and he answered no letters about it.
He was an old man when it happened, and he died at sea soon after my
indentures expired. The woman and child were brought here, where nobody
could speak French, and, of course, neither of them could speak any
English. The boy was white-faced and frightened at first, but he
soon picked up spirit. They were taken in and cared for by one and
another--any who could afford it. For Farlingfo