o! What's amiss?" sang out Cap'n Dick, as the _Unity_ fetched
within hail.

"Aw, nothin', nothin'. 'Tho' troubles assail an' dangers'--Stiddy
there, you old angletwitch!--She's a bit too fond o' smelling the
wind, that's all."

As a matter of fact she'd taken more water than Jacka cared to think
about, now that the danger was over.

"But what brings 'ee here? An' what cheer wi' _you?_" he asked.

This was Cap'n Dick's chance. "I've had a run between two French
frigates," he boasted, "in broad day, an' given the slip to both!"

"Dear, now!" said Cap'n Jacka. "So have I--in broad day, too. They
must ha' been the very same. What did 'ee take out of 'em?"

"Take! They were two war frigates, I tell 'ee!"

"Iss, iss; don't lose your temper. All I managed to take was this
young French orcifer here; but I thought, maybe, that you--having a
handier craft--"

Jacka chuckled a bit; but he wasn't one to keep a joke going for
spite.

"Look-y-here, Cap'n," he said; "I'll hear your tale when we get into
dock, and you shall hear mine. What I want 'ee to do just now is to
take this here lugger again and sail along in to Plymouth with her as
your prize. I wants, if possible, to spare the feelin's of this young
gentleman, an' make it look that he was brought in by force. For so he
was, though not in the common way. An' I likes the fellow, too, though
he do kick terrible hard."

* * * * *

They do say that two days later, when Cap'n Jacka walked up to his own
door, he carried the cinder-sifter under his arm; and that, before
ever he kissed his wife, he stepped fore and hitched it on a nail
right in the middle of the wall over the chimney-piece, between John
Wesley and the weather-glass.

THE POISONED ICE

We were four in the _patio_. And the _patio_ was magnificent, with a
terrace of marble running round its four sides, and in the middle a
fountain splashing in a marble basin. I will not swear to the marble;
for I was a boy of ten at the time, and that is a long while ago.
But I describe as I recollect. It was a magnificent _patio_, at all
events, and the house was a palace. And who the owner might be, Felipe
perhaps knew. But he was not one to tell, and the rest of us neither
knew nor cared.

The two women lay stretched on the terrace, with their heads close
together and resting against the house wall. And I sat beside them
gnawing a bone. The sun shone over the low eastern wall up