be so mighty pleased to hear about the _Bonaventure_ that
he'll forget to ask how I come to be to Firestone Bay instead of to
schule."

And the exultant lad dashed away toward Stonehouse, accompanied by his
companions, each of whom was instantly ready to help with suggestions as
to the spending of the prospective noble.

The historian of the period has omitted to record whether that worthy,
Mr Richard Marshall, one of the most thriving merchants of Plymouth,
was as good as his word in the matter of the promised noble; but
probably he was, for shortly after the arrival of his nephew with the
momentous news, the good man emerged from his house, smiling and rubbing
his hands with satisfaction, and made the best of his way to the wharf
in Stonehouse Pool, alongside which he knew that the _Bonaventure_ would
moor, and was there speedily joined by quite a little crowd of other
people who were all more or less intimately interested in the ship and
her crew, and who had been brought to the spot by the rapid spread of
the news that the _Bonaventure_ was approaching.

To the impatient watchers it seemed an age before the ship hove in sight
at the mouth of the Pool. At length, however, as the sun dipped behind
the wooded slopes across the water toward Millbrook, a ship's spritsail
and sprit topsail, with a long pennon streaming from the head of the
mast which supported the latter, crept slowly into view beyond Devil's
Point, to the accompaniment of a general shout of "There a be!" from the
waiting crowd, and a minute later the entire ship stood revealed,
heading up the Pool under all sail, to the impulse of the dying breeze
which was by this time so faint that the white canvas of the approaching
craft scarcely strained at all upon its sheets and yards.

For the period, the _Bonaventure_ was a ship of considerable size, her
registered measurement being one hundred and twenty-seven tons. She was
practically new, the voyage which she was now completing being only her
second. Like other ships of her size and time, she was very beamy, with
rounded sides that tumbled home to a degree that in these days would be
regarded as preposterous. She carried the usual fore and after castles,
the latter surmounting the after extremity of her lofty poop. She was
rigged with three masts in addition to the short spar which reared
itself from the outer extremity of her bowsprit, and upon which the
sprit topsail was set, the fore and main masts