n and looking over into the sternsheets of the derelict. "Can't say
exactly, sir. They're in an awful state!"

"Ho, bad job!" muttered the commodore aft, on the poop, as if talking to
himself; and then in a louder key he sang out, "You'd better bring the
boat alongside and let the doctor see them!"

Thereupon the bowman hitching the cutter's painter to the stem of the
other boat which projected above the gunwale, and letting out the slack
of the rope so as the boat should not come too close, Mr Osborne giving
some order to that effect, they took her in tow, and in a few strokes
were alongside the ship again.

When they came up, there was no reason for any one to ask why the first
lieutenant had held his handkerchief to his face.

The stench was abominable!

The doctor, who was ready and waiting at the ship's side, at once went
down by the commodore's orders and examined the dead men, who we now saw
were five in number, though they smelt like five hundred.

"Bedad, Tom," said Mick to me, as we looked down over the side, holding
our noses--as, indeed, everybody on board was doing, every man-jack in
the ship, I think, being on deck, from the old commodore down to the
youngest middy and ship's boy--"Oi nivver smilt a shmell loike thet
since me faither an' Oi wor at Clontarf whin they opened the graveyard
theer, and toorned the owld coffins out wid the bones rattlin' aboot in
thim jist loike pays in a pannikin, sure, whin we're goin' fur to make
pay-soup, or pay doo, ez we used fur to call it aboard the owld _Saint
Vincent_!"

Mr Osborne meanwhile had come up the side; and from where Mick and I
were standing, by the mizzen-chains, I could hear distinctly every word
he said, though I missed the first part, from Mick Donovan speaking to
me at the moment, and he was in the middle of a sentence when I began to
take in his words.

"--Must have been a terrible scrimmage, sir. One of the cutlasses seems
covered with dry blood right up to the hilt; while the two dead chaps
between the thwarts are cut about and carved in all directions. The lot
of them, no doubt, were at it hammer and tongs when the flash came."

"Begorrah," whispered Mick in my ear, in comment on this statement, "it
wor jist loike the two Kilkenny cats, sure, who fought till thaire wor
ownly theer tails lift, sure!"

The commodore, however, took a graver view of the matter.

"It must have been awfully sudden, Mr Osborne," he said; "and you think
the