wever, from the upper part of the right thigh, until his teeth reached
the knee, where he nipped the shank clean off, and made sail with the
leg in his jaws. Poor little Louis never once moved after we took him
in.--I thought I heard a small, still, stern voice thrill along my
nerves, as if an echo of the beating of my heart had become articulate.
"Thomas, a fortnight ago, you impressed that poor boy, who _was_,
and _now is not_, out of a Bristol ship." Alas, conscience spoke no
more than the truth.

Our instructions were to lie at St. Jago, until three British ships,
then loading, were ready for sea, and then to convey them through the
Caicos, or windward passage. As our stay was therefore likely to be ten
days or a fortnight at the shortest, the boats were hoisted out, and
we made our little arrangements and preparations for taking all the
recreation in our power, and our worthy skipper, taught and stiff as he
was at sea, always encouraged all kinds of fun and larking, both amongst
the men and the officers on occasions like the present. Amongst his
other pleasant qualities, he was a great boat-racer, constantly building
and altering gigs, and pulling-boats, at his own expense, and matching
the men against each other for small prizes. He had just finished
what the old carpenter considered his _chef-d'oeuvre_, and a curious
affair this same masterpiece was. In the first place it was forty-two
feet long over all, and only three and a half feet beam--the planking
was not much above an eighth of an inch in thickness, so that if one
of the crew had slipped his foot off the stretcher, it must have gone
through the bottom. There was a standing order that no man was to go
into it with shoes on. She was to pull six oars, and her crew were the
captains of the tops, the primest seamen in the ship, and the steersman
no less a character than the skipper himself.

Her name, for I love to be particular, was the Dragon-fly; she was
painted out and in of a bright red, amounting to a flame colour--oars
red--the men wearing trousers and shirts of red flannel, and red net
night caps--which common uniform the captain himself wore, I think I
have said before, that he was a very handsome man, and when he had taken
his seat, and the _gigs_, all fine men, were seated each with his oar
held upright upon his knees ready to be dropped into the water at the
same instant, the craft and her crew formed to my eye as pretty a
plaything for grown chil