‘I will tell you nothing until I have dined,’ answered Captain Regnier. The young man sat with a white face viewing his uncle wistfully. There was expression enough in the fat Frenchman’s stolid face to reassure me; moreover, I could not suppose that he would think of his dinner and apparently of nothing but his dinner in a time of danger. Yet, had he informed Alphonse that the brig was in peril I should have listened to the news with indifference. My dejection was heart-crushing. I was wretched to the inmost recesses of my spirit with the despair that comes of hopelessness, and never before had I felt so lonely. The brig’s movements were horribly uncomfortable. It was blowing very hard and the sea was growing. I do not know whether the vessel was sailing--that is to say, whether she was making any progress through the water--but they were steering her so as to cause her side to form an angle with the gulfs of the foaming billows, and the dance of the light structure was as though she must at any moment go to pieces. Despite the jerky, convulsive, dislocating movements, the grimy French lad who waited in the cabin contrived to place the dinner upon the table. The meal was composed largely of soup, and I cannot conceive how the youth managed. I drank a little soup and ate a piece of biscuit, and this with a small draught of red wine formed my dinner. Alphonse ate nothing; he continuously gazed at his uncle, who addressed himself to the meal with both hands, gradually lying back as he drained the contents of a large tin dishful of soup, and then placing a bottle half full of wine at his lips and emptying it, and then grasping a large piece of sausage with one hand and a whole biscuit with the other and rapidly devouring them. ‘This is not a moment to think of knives and forks,’ said he; ‘if we are to perish let us meet our end well lined.’ ‘To perish!’ cried Alphonse. ‘Bah!’ exclaimed Captain Regnier, with his mouth full. ‘Did you not tell me the other day that if I were a waiter I would know a thing or two? Well, I now imagine myself a waiter, and am talking as one. As a waiter I pronounce that we shall perish, but as a sailor I say no! no! we shall not perish this time. There are many napkins remaining for you to fashion into fans and cocked-hats before you are drowned by shipwreck.’ The young Frenchman’s vivacity immediately returned to him. ‘It is inspiriting to even think of napkins at such a time,’ said he. ‘They awaken fancies of the hotel, the _table-d’hôte_, of a thousand agreeable things. After Toulon--the deluge. You do not catch me returning to Boulogne with you, uncle. Give me the railway. I now detest the sea. Ciel! how the ship leaps. And remark this poor lady. How has the sea served her?’ He snapped his fingers, and extended his hand for a piece of the sausage. Both men spoke in French, but I understood enough of their discourse to enable me to repeat the substance of it.