place we had
left: Dr Hellyer, perhaps, would have been more pleased to see us than
we should have been to meet him!

The wind, on our return trip, was still westerly, and consequently
against us; so I had no reason to complain of any lack of instruction in
seamanship on this part of the voyage. It was "tacks and
sheets"--"mainsail haul"--and "bout-ship"--"down anchor" as the tide
changed, and "up with it!" again, when the flood or ebb was in our
favour--all the way from the Mouse Light to Beachy Head!

In performing these various nautical manoeuvres, I had plenty of
exercise aloft, so that my previous teaching, when I used to go down to
the quay in the summer vacations on being left alone at school, stood me
now in good stead; and in a little while I became really, for a lad of
my years, an expert seaman, able to hand, reef, steer, and take a watch
with any on board, long before we got to Plymouth!

But, it was not so with Tom.

The coal business, he thought, having no turn for colliery work, was bad
enough; but, when it came to have to go aloft in a gale of wind and take
in sail on a dark night, with the flapping canvas trying to jerk one off
the yard, Tom acknowledged that he had no stomach to be a sailor--he
preferred gymnastics ashore!

Although, otherwise, I had found him bold and fearless to desperation,
he now evinced a nervous timidity about mounting the rigging that I
didn't think he had in him. It seemed utterly unlike the dauntless Tom
of old acquaintanceship on land.

He said that he really "funked" going aloft, for it made his head swim
when he looked down. I told him that if he got in the habit of looking
down at the water below whenever he ascended the shrouds, instead of its
only making his head swim, as he now complained, it would inevitably
result in his entire self being forced to do so! However, he said he
could not possibly help it, and really I don't believe he could.

Some people are so constituted.

The upshot was that the skipper, noticing his inefficiency in the work
of the ship, made him his cabin boy, in place of the lad who had
hitherto occupied that enviable position, and whom he now sent forward
amongst the other hands in the fo'c's'le.

But the change did not bring any amelioration to poor Tom's lot. It was
"like going from the frying-pan into the fire;" for, now, my unfortunate
chum, being immediately under the control of the skipper, who was a
surly, ill-tempered brute