"_Sacre!_" he exclaimed. "But I sail at once. Come! I have it. I lost my third mate in a brush with an English privateer last month. He was a cleanly man of much your build. You shall ship in his berth." I pointed to the nearest flatboat. "That is the extent of my seamanship, Monsieur Captain." He shrugged. "The clothes will fit, if the berth does not. You can save your present costume for your landing." I bowed assent, and we at once swung along side by side to a wharf where his boat was in waiting for him. With a courtesy which I did not then appreciate, though I noted how it impressed the half-dozen swarthy, red-capped oarsmen, he sprang first into the stern-sheets. The moment I stepped in after him, the men pushed off. They rowed with a skill and regularity of stroke that speedily brought us out around the brig which blocked our view, when we approached the most graceful sloop upon which I had ever set eyes. Not being a seaman, I can only say that the _Siren's_ masts and yards seemed to me to be unusually long, and the former strongly inclined to the stern--raked, I believe is the marine term. Her hull, which was painted a dull gray, with a narrow stripe of red, was sharp in the bow, broad and overhanging at the stern, and low-set in the water. When we came aboard, I noticed that the sloop's decks were cleaner and more orderly than those of any other merchant vessel I had seen at close quarters, and that besides a number of carronades, she carried abaft the mainmast a great pivot-gun that could have found few mates afloat elsewhere than aboard a man-of-war. It was a long French twenty-four-pounder, which is really a twenty-six-and-a-half-pounder by English weight. As is well known, many frigates carry no heavier longs than eighteen-pounders. Observing my interested glance, Captain Lafitte said, with a smile: "As you see, doctor, Monsieur Clark is disinclined to deliver his sloop and cargo to the Spanish privateers without a protest." "Is the _Siren_, then, his vessel?" I asked in surprise. "For this voyage, at least," he answered; and leaving me to guess what this might mean, he turned and called out a series of nautical orders in a voice like a trumpet. Instantly such a swarm of sailors poured up from the forecastle and hatchways and rushed here and there about the decks that I wondered they did not run one another down. Between times the Captain beckoned to a grinning imp of a cabin-boy and told him to show me below. It was three days before I again saw the deck. Once the sloop was under way, Captain Lafitte came down long enough to start me overhauling the chests of the dead third mate. This kept me occupied until the mid-afternoon, aside from the time it took me to eat the savory meal brought to me by the cabin-boy. Captain Lafitte remained all the time on deck with the pilot who conned us down to the Gulf. When at last he did come below, the sloop was pitching in a rough cross-sea and I was most disgracefully nauseated.