ou've no need to trubble yourself sir ill keep my I on them and
bring em safe to hand with return cargo and hoping you'll excuse
the stamp not expecting to have to rite from the fust stoppige your
obedient humble servant

"SAMUEL ROWE."

As I have said, we did not suspect that Mr. Rowe had betrayed us by
post; but in the course of the afternoon Fred said to me, "I'll tell
you what, Charlie, I know old Rowe well, and he's up to any trick,
and sure to want to keep in with my father. If we don't take care
he'll take us back with him. And what fools we shall look then!"

The idea was intolerable; but I warned Fred to carefully avoid
betraying that we suspected him. The captain had had worse enemies to
outwit, and had kept a pirate in good humour for a much longer voyage
by affability and rum. We had no means of clouding Mr. Rowe's
particularly sharp wits with grog, but we resolved to be amiable and
wary, and when we did get to London to look out for the first
opportunity of giving the barge-master the slip.

CHAPTER IX.

A COASTING VOYAGE--MUSK ISLAND--LINNET FLASH--MR. ROWE AN OLD TAR--THE
DOG-FANCIER AT HOME.

It was a delightful feature of our first voyage--and one which we
could not hope to enjoy so often in voyages to come--that we were
always close to land, and this on both sides. We could touch either
coast without difficulty, and as the barge stopped several times
during the day to rest the horse, Fred and I had more than one chance
of going ashore.

I hope to have many a voyage yet, and to see stranger people and
places than I saw then, but I hardly hope ever to enjoy myself so much
again. I have long ago found out that Fred's stories of the captain's
adventures were not true stories, and as I have read and learned more
about the world than I knew at that time, I know now that there are
only certain things which one can meet with by land or by sea. But
when Fred and I made our first voyage in emulation of his grandfather
there was no limit to my expectations, or to what we were prepared to
see or experience at every fresh bend of the London and Lancingford
Canal.

I remember one of Fred's stories about the captain was of his spending
a year and a day on an island called Musk Island, in the Pacific. He
had left the ship, Fred said, to do a little exploring alone in his
gig. Not knowing at that time that the captain's gig is a boat, I was
a good deal puzzled, I remember, to thin