come into your mind to try t'other end a bit, and you
shift all the guns and heavy lumber forrard to give weight to the bows
and lift the starn, and off her will glide at the first tug to-morrow,
so sure as my name is Zebedee. But mind one thing, sir, that you keep
her, when you've got her. She hath too many furriner natives aboard of
her, to be any way to my liking."

"Oh, there need be no doubt about them," replied Blyth; "we treat them
like ourselves, and they are all upon their honour, which no Frenchman
ever thinks of breaking. But my men will be tired of waiting for me. I
shall leave you to your plans, Tugwell."

"Ah, I know the natur' of they young men," Captain Zebedee mused, as he
sate in his hollow, till Scudamore's boat was far away; "they be full
of scruples for themselves and faith in other fellows. He'll never tell
Squire, nor no one else here, what I laid him under, and the laugh would
go again' him, if he did. We shall get to-day's money, I reckon, as well
as double pay to-morrow, and airn it. Well, it might 'a been better, and
it might be wuss."

About two miles westward of the brook, some rocks marked the end of the
fine Springhaven sands and the beginning of a far more rugged beach, the
shingles and flint shelves of Pebbleridge. Here the chalk of the Sussex
backbone (which has been plumped over and sleeked by the flesh of the
valley) juts forth, like the scrags of a skeleton, and crumbles in low
but rugged cliffs into the flat domain of sea. Here the landing is bad,
and the anchorage worse, for a slippery shale rejects the fluke, and the
water is usually kept in a fidget between the orders of the west wind
and scurry of the tide.

This very quiet morning, with the wind off shore, and scarcely enough of
it to comb the sea, four smart-looking Frenchmen, with red caps on their
heads, were barely holding way upon the light gig of the Blonde, while
their Captain was keeping an appointment with a stranger, not far
from the weed-strewn line of waves. In a deep rocky channel where a
land-spring rose (which was still-born except at low water), and laver
and dilsk and claw-coral showed that the sea had more dominion there
than the sky, two men stood facing each other; and their words, though
belonging to the most polite of tongues, were not so courteous as might
be. Each man stood with his back to a rock--not touching it, however,
because it was too wet--one was as cold and as firm as the rock,
the other l