his pockets and his cap very much on
one side of his head, entered my drawing-room one morning with a
perplexed air.

"What troubles you to-day?" asked Lizzie Gordon, who was seated at the
window winding up a ball of worsted, the skein of which was being held
by Miss Puff, who was at that time residing with us.

"What troubles me?--everything troubles me," said the middy with a stern
air, as he turned his back to the fire; "the world troubles me,
circumstances trouble me, my heart troubles me, my pocket troubles me,
my friends and relations trouble me, and so do my enemies; in fact, it
would be difficult to name the sublunary creature or thing that does
_not_ trouble me. It blows trouble from every point of the compass, a
peculiarity in moral gales that is never observed in physical breezes."

"How philosophically you talk this morning," observed Lizzie with a
laugh. "May it not be just possible that the trouble, instead of
flowing from all points to you as a centre, wells up within and flows
out in all directions, and that a warped mind inverts the process?"

"Perhaps you are right, sweet cousin! Anyhow we can't be both wrong,
which is a comfort."

"May I ask what is the heart-trouble you complain of?" said Lizzie.

"Love and hatred," replied Gildart with a sigh and a frown.

"Indeed! Is the name of the beloved object a secret?"

"Of course," said the middy with a pointed glance at Miss Puff, who
blushed scarlet from the roots of her hair to the edge of her dress,
(perhaps to the points of her toes--I am inclined to think so); "of
course it is; but the hated object's name is no secret. It is Haco
Barepoles."

"The mad skipper!" exclaimed Lizzie in surprise. "I thought he was the
most amiable man in existence. Every one speaks well of him."

"It may be so, but I hate him. The hatred is peculiar, though I believe
not incurable, but at present it is powerful. That preposterous giant,
that fathom and four inches of conceit, that insufferable disgrace to
his cloth, that huge mass of human bones in a pig-skin--he--he bothers
me."

"But how does he bother you?"

"Well, in the first place, he positively refuses to let his daughter
Susan marry Dan Horsey, and I have set my heart on that match, for Susan
is a favourite of mine, and Dan is a capital fellow, though he is a
groom and a scoundrel--and nothing would delight me more than to bother
our cook, who is a perfect vixen, and would naturally die of vex