s villainous insult on myself?"

The owner, who was standing in the steerage brimming over with the
ludicrous character of the previous night's frivolity, was heard to
chuckle and say: "What damned nonsense to ask such a silly question!"

[Illustration: CAPTAIN PLUNKER ASTONISHED.]

Each of the lads stoutly denied having any knowledge of what had
happened, whereupon Plunker called them "a set of damned lying
mutineers, who ought to be swung to the yardarm." This phrase was
commonly used at that time whenever it was thought necessary to
emphasise displeasure. Sanguinary penalties were roundly threatened to
them and to their scoundrelly accomplices. Leading questions were put
in a more or less forceful way, but the boys determined to preserve a
secretive and even aggressive aspect, which sent their burly commander
into an ecstasy of violence. At last, despairing of getting any
satisfaction, he told them to get out of his sight. And tradition says
that he was never known to smile again; but the _Cauducas_ became from
that day one of the best found vessels, and her crew the best fed that
sailed out of port. There was no more concealment or locking up, or
doling out of Yarmouth bloaters, or any other thing. A great change had
been wrought in the hitherto inexorable old man of the sea. His conduct
became marked by a generosity that wiped out recollections of past
meanness. His natural make-up prevented him from giving prominence to
his better side, or of making himself endeared to those faithful men
who spent a long life in his service, sharing his precarious fortunes
in working and navigating a vessel that his contemporaries predicted
would carry him and his crew to a tragic doom. Yet this man of icy
exterior, blunt, uncouth and ofttimes vulgar manners, had beating
within him as big a heart as ever was planted in a human breast. His
men knew that there was a power about him that fascinated them. They
could not call it affection, but it was something akin to it: a strong
magnetism, indeed, that inspired their confidence and caused them to
follow him into dangers that resembled the very jaws of death. It was
never a thought of his to show any tender feelings. His susceptibilities
would have been much offended could he have been presented with the
idea that he had a soft place anywhere in his heart. This reluctance to
be supposed effeminate was a characteristic of the age which caused
many acts of injustice to be committed in