riflemen they advanced, skirmishing, one supporting the other.
Dicky, however, was the most adventurous; without him, probably, Sims
would have remained in the background. Sims had some modesty. Glover
had the allowance with which, for wise ends, midshipmen are usually
gifted.

"There's a pretty girl! she hasn't footed it for a long time; there's
nothing like trying it. I'll go and ask her," exclaimed Dicky, as if
suddenly seized with an irresistible impulse; and before Sims could make
any remark he had crossed the intervening space to where the lady at
whom he had pointed was sitting, and was bowing and scraping, and
smiling with the greatest self-confidence.

The young lady looked rather astonished, and not over well pleased, but
this did not in any way abash Mr Glover. While he with praiseworthy
perseverance was still scraping away, requesting the hand of the lady
for a cotillion, a minuette, or a country-dance, a gentleman came up and
spoke to her. Glover looked at her earnestly, and spoke a few words;
she put out her hand, he took it, and wrung it till she almost cried
out.

"Cousin Susan!" he exclaimed. "Well, I didn't think it was you, and yet
I ought to have known you among a thousand. But you know you were but a
little girl when we last met, and now you are grown up and married.
Well--but I'm so very glad!--how jolly! I didn't expect to enjoy this
ball; but now I shall like it very much."

Thus Glover rattled on, and to the surprise of Morton and Sims, and his
other shipmates, who had not overheard the conversation, was seen
standing up to dance with an air of conscious superiority and perfect
self-satisfaction. Sims was rather jealous. Morton was highly amused.
Glover flew up and down the room, enjoying the dance to the full. What
cared he for the heat. What mattered to him that he trod on the toes of
innumerable rajahs and nabobs, who would gladly have stuck their
jewel-hilted daggers into him, or given him an embrace with a tiger's
claw; an instrument worthy of Asiatic invention. His cousin, however,
had soon introduced Glover to a more active partner, and so engrossed
was he at first that he quite forgot to come back to his friends.

While Morton was watching the dancers an officer with a young lady stood
up near him to join them. His eye was attracted to her countenance, and
he was struck by its excessively pleasing expression. He looked and
looked again: he thought her exquisitely bea