shall be obeyed," the Frenchman answered, with a
light salute and smile, for he was not endowed with the power of hating,
or he might have indulged that bad power towards Carne; "but I fear that
he has not found things to his liking."

"What concern is that of yours? Your duty is to carry out my orders, to
the utmost of your ability, and offer opinion when asked for."

The light-hearted Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. "My commanding
officer is right," he said; "but the sea is getting up, and there will
be wind, unless I mistake the arising of the moon. My commanding officer
had better retire, until his commands are needed. He has been known
to feel the effects of high tossing, in spite of his unequalled
constitution. Is it not so, my commander? I ask with deference, and
anxiety."

Carne, who liked to have the joke on his side only, swore at the moon
and the wind, in clear English, which was shorter and more efficacious
than French. He longed to say, "Try to keep me out of rough water," but
his pride, and the fear of suggesting the opposite to this sailor who
loved a joke, kept him silent, and he withdrew to his little cuddy,
chewing a biscuit, to feed, if it must be so, the approaching malady.

"We shall have some game, and a fine game too," said Renaud Charron to
himself, as he ordered more sail to be made. "Milord gives himself such
mighty airs! We will take him to the cross-run off the Middle Bank,
and offer him a basin through the key-hole. To make sea-sick an
Englishman--for, after all, what other is he?--will be a fine piece of
revenge for fair France."

Widow Shanks had remarked with tender sorrow--more perhaps because she
admired the young man, and was herself a hearty soul, than from any loss
of profit in victualling him--that "he was one of they folk as seems to
go about their business, and do their jobs, and keep their skins as full
as other people, without putting nort inside of them." She knew one
of that kind before, and he was shot by the Coast-guard, and when they
postmartyred him, an eel twenty foot long was found inside him, doubled
up for all the world like a love-knot. Squire Carne was of too high
a family for that; but she would give a week's rent to know what was
inside him.

There was no little justice in these remarks, as is pretty sure to be
the case with all good-natured criticism. The best cook that ever was
roasted cannot get out of a pot more than was put in it; and the weight
of a