o
France, after what has happened, if you can help it."

"Can we possibly help it? Or do you propose that four men shall re-take
this vessel from seventeen?"

"Well, the odds are not so great, Miles," Marble rejoined, looking coolly
round at the noisy set of little Frenchmen, who were all talking together
over their soup; certainly not a very formidable band in a hand-to-hand
encounter, though full of fire and animation. "There are four of us, and
only seventeen of them, such as they are. I rather think we could handle
'em all, in a regular set-to, with fists. There's Neb, he's as strong as a
jackass; Diogenes is another Hercules; and neither you nor I am a kitten.
I consider you as a match, in a serious scuffle, for the best four among
them chaps."

This was not said in the least boastingly, though certainly the estimate
of comparative force made by my mate was enormously out of the way. It was
true, that we four were unusually powerful and athletic men; but it was
also true, that six of the French might very well be placed in the same
category. I was not subject to the vulgar prejudice of national
superiority, I hope; one of the strongest of all the weaknesses of our
very weak nature. I have never yet been in a country, of which the people
did not fancy themselves, in all particulars, the salt of the earth;
though there are very different degrees in the modes of bragging on such
subjects. In the present instance, Marble had not the least idea of
bragging, however; for he really believed we four, in an open onslaught,
fire-arms out of the question, might have managed those seventeen
Frenchmen. I think, myself, we might have got along with twice our number,
taking a fair average of the privateer's men, and reducing the struggle to
the arms of nature; but I should have hesitated a long time in making an
open attack on even them.

Still, I began to regard my chances of escaping, should we be sent into a
French port by the privateer, as far less certain than they had appeared
at first. Marble had so much to say of the anarchists in France, as he had
known them in the worst period of the revolution, and so many stories to
tell of ships seized and of merchants ruined, that my confidence in the
right was shaken. Bonaparte was then in the height of his consular
power,--on the point of becoming Emperor, indeed,--and he had commenced
this new war with a virulence and disregard of acknowledged rights, in the
detention of all