phrase--"So, you're going to be hanged for a pirate." His comments
on the phrase were, however, a little varied, though always brief--such
as--"Wot a sell! Who'd ha' thought it! It's a dream, it is, an
'orrible dream! _I_ don't believe it--who does? Wot'll your poor
mother say?"--and the like.

Bumpus had, unfortunately, good ground for making this statement.

After the cutter sailed it was discovered that Bumpus was concealed in
Mrs Stuart's cottage. This discovery had been the result of the
seaman's own recklessness and indiscretion; for when he ascertained that
he was to be kept a prisoner in the cottage until the return of the
_Wasp_, he at once made up his mind to submit with a good grace to what
could not be avoided. In order to prove that he was by no means cast
down, as well as to lighten the tedium of his confinement, Jo
entertained himself by singing snatches of sea songs--such as, "My tight
little craft,"--"A life on the stormy sea,"--"Oh! for a draught of the
howling blast," etcetera, all of which he delivered in a bass voice so
powerful that it caused the rafters of the widow's cottage to ring
again.

These melodious not to say thunderous sounds, also caused the ears of a
small native youth to tingle with curiosity. This urchin crept on his
brown little knees under the window of Bumpus's apartment, got on his
brown and dirty little tiptoes, placed his brown little hands on the
sill, hauled his brown and half-naked little body up by sheer force of
muscle, and peeped into the room with his large and staring brown eyes,
the whites of which were displayed to their full extent.

Jo was in the middle of an enthusiastic "oh!" when the urchin's head
appeared. Instead of expressing his passionate desire for a "draught of
the howling blast," he prolonged the "oh!" into a hideous yell, and
thrust his blazing face close to the window so suddenly that the boy let
go his hold, fell backwards, and rolled head over heels into a ditch,
out of which he scrambled with violent haste, and ran with the utmost
possible precipitancy to his native home on the sea-shore.

Here he related what he had seen to his father. The father went and
looked in upon Jo's solitude. He happened to have seen Bumpus during
the great fight and knew him to be one of the pirates. The village rose
_en masse_. Some of the worst characters in it stirred up the rest,
went to the widow's cottage, and demanded that the person of the pirate