I am in
the havens of Man; but when I am on the broad seas, den my tongue is
mine own, you know. Die foolish beoples in the island, they say she is
a wechsel-balg--what you call a fairy-elf changeling. My faith, they do
not never have seen ein wechsel-balg; for I saw one myself at Cologne,
and it was twice as big as yonder girl, and did break the poor people,
with eating them up, like de great big cuckoo in the sparrow's nest; but
this Venella eat no more than other girls--it was no wechsel-balg in the
world."

By a different train of reasoning, Julian had arrived at the same
conclusion; in which, therefore, he heartily acquiesced. During the
seaman's prosing, he was reflecting within himself, how much of the
singular flexibility of her limbs and movements the unfortunate girl
must have derived from the discipline and instructions of Adrian
Brackel; and also how far the germs of her wilful and capricious
passions might have been sown during her wandering and adventurous
childhood. Aristocratic, also, as his education had been, these
anecdotes respecting Fenella's original situation and education, rather
increased his pleasure of having shaken off her company; and yet he
still felt desirous to know any farther particulars which the seaman
could communicate on the same subject. But he had already told all he
knew. Of her parents he knew nothing, except that "her father must have
been a damned hundsfoot, and a schelm, for selling his own flesh and
blood to Adrian Brackel;" for by such a transaction had the mountebank
become possessed of his pupil.

This conversation tended to remove any passing doubts which might have
crept on Peveril's mind concerning the fidelity of the master of the
vessel, who appeared from thence to have been a former acquaintance
of the Countess, and to have enjoyed some share of her confidence. The
threatening motion used by Fenella, he no longer considered as worthy of
any notice, excepting as a new mark of the irritability of her temper.

He amused himself with walking the deck, and musing on his past and
future prospects, until his attention was forcibly arrested by the
wind, which began to rise in gusts from the north-west, in a manner so
unfavourable to the course they intended to hold, that the master, after
many efforts to beat against it, declared his bark, which was by no
means an excellent sea-boat, was unequal to making Whitehaven; and that
he was compelled to make a fair wind of it,