‘It was cast with a kink, sorr; it dhroops amidships and shoots as Mister Crimp’s larboard oye peeps, your honour, though loike his oye it manes well.’ ‘Nonsense,’ I cried, ‘you must have covered the boat to hit it.’ ‘By all that’s sacred then,’ cried the man, ‘I had the natest observation of the brig’s maintopmasht as ever oye could bring the muzzle of a pace to soight. The gun was cast with a kink, sorr.’ ‘My belief is that you’re utterly ignorant of guns,’ cried Wilfrid. ‘The concussion was fierce enough to shake the yacht to pieces.’ ‘’Twas your honour’s design to froighten ’em.’ ‘But not to murder them, you dolt!’ shouted Wilfrid. ‘D’ye know I could have you _hanged_ for this.’ ‘It was but a haythen Portuguay, sorr,’ answered the fellow, preserving his ramrod-like posture and his unwinking stare. ‘Tell him to go forward, Finn; tell him to go forward,’ cried Wilfrid, ‘and see that he never has any more to do with that gun on any account whatever, d’ye understand?’ The seaman knuckled his forehead and wheeled round, but methought I could just catch a glimpse past his whisker of a sudden protrusion of the cheek as though he was signalling with his tongue to a brother Jack who was flemish-coiling a rope not very far from where he was standing. The luncheon bell rang and we went below. At table we could talk of nothing but the unhappy Portuguese whom our round-shot had sent to the bottom. Muffin’s face of respectful horror was a feature of the time which I recall more vividly than even the disaster itself. This man, though he was in attendance on Wilfrid as a valet, regularly stood behind his master’s chair at meals. It was Wilfrid’s whim to have him at hand. He did not offer to wait unless it was to procure anything my cousin might require when the stewards were busy with Miss Jennings and myself, or one or both of them absent. His air of deferential consternation was exceedingly fine as he listened to our talk about the annihilated boat and the foundered foreigner--‘Who,’ said I, with a glance at his yellow visage, the shocked expression of which he tried to smother by twisting his lips into a sort of shape that might pass as a faint obsequious simper and by keeping his eyelids lowered, ‘let us trust was cut in halves, for then his extinction would be painless; for after all, drowning, though it is reckoned an agreeable death after consciousness has fled, is mortal agony, I take it, whilst the sensation of suffocation remains.’ Muffin’s left leg fell away with an exceedingly nervous crooking of it in the trouser, and he turned up his eyes an instant to the upper deck with so sickly a roll, that spite of myself I burst into a laugh, though I swiftly recovered myself.