, awast, my eyes! Wal'r,
dear lad, sheer off for to-night, and leave the pretty one to me!'

Walter took her hand in both of his, and put it to his lips, and kissed
it. He knew now that she was, indeed, a homeless wandering fugitive;
but, richer to him so, than in all the wealth and pride of her right
station, she seemed farther off than even on the height that had made
him giddy in his boyish dreams.

Captain Cuttle, perplexed by no such meditations, guarded Florence to
her room, and watched at intervals upon the charmed ground outside her
door--for such it truly was to him--until he felt sufficiently easy
in his mind about her, to turn in under the counter. On abandoning his
watch for that purpose, he could not help calling once, rapturously,
through the keyhole, 'Drownded. Ain't he, pretty?'--or, when he got
downstairs, making another trial at that verse of Lovely Peg. But it
stuck in his throat somehow, and he could make nothing of it; so he went
to bed, and dreamed that old Sol Gills was married to Mrs MacStinger,
and kept prisoner by that lady in a secret chamber on a short allowance
of victuals.

CHAPTER 50. Mr Toots's Complaint

There was an empty room above-stairs at the wooden Midshipman's, which,
in days of yore, had been Walter's bedroom. Walter, rousing up the
Captain betimes in the morning, proposed that they should carry thither
such furniture out of the little parlour as would grace it best, so that
Florence might take possession of it when she rose. As nothing could be
more agreeable to Captain Cuttle than making himself very red and short
of breath in such a cause, he turned to (as he himself said) with a
will; and, in a couple of hours, this garret was transformed into a
species of land-cabin, adorned with all the choicest moveables out of
the parlour, inclusive even of the Tartar frigate, which the Captain
hung up over the chimney-piece with such extreme delight, that he could
do nothing for half-an-hour afterwards but walk backward from it, lost
in admiration.

The Captain could be indueed by no persuasion of Walter's to wind up the
big watch, or to take back the canister, or to touch the sugar-tongs and
teaspoons. 'No, no, my lad;' was the Captain's invariable reply to any
solicitation of the kind, 'I've made that there little property over,
jintly.' These words he repeated with great unction and gravity,
evidently believing that they had the virtue of an Act of Parliament,
and that unl