‘Maybe, Charles, maybe,’ he answered, with a dull smile; ‘he may have been an undertaker’s man for all I know; though I doubt it, because I had him from Lord ---- with a five years’ character, every word of which has proved true. But I knew you would have your joke. The fellow fits my temper to a hair; he has a hearse-like face, I admit; but then he is the quietest man in the world--a very ghost; summon him, and if he shaped himself out of thin air he couldn’t appear at your elbow more noiselessly. That’s his main recommendation to me. Any kind of noise now I find distracting; even music--Laura will tell you that I’ll run a mile to escape the sound of a piano.’ At this moment a pair of pilot breeches showed themselves in the companion-way, and down came Captain Finn. As he stood, hat in hand, soberly clothed, with nothing more gimcrack in the way of finery upon him than a row of brass waistcoat-buttons, I thought he looked a very proper, sailorly sort of man. There was no lack of intelligence in his eyes, which protruded, as from a long habit of staring too eagerly to windward, and trying to see into the inside of gales of wind. He was remarkable, however, for a face that was out of all proportion too long, not for the width of his head only, but for his body; whilst his legs, on the other hand, were as much too short, so that he submitted himself as a person whose capacity of growth had been experimentally distributed, insomuch that his legs appeared to have come to a full stop when he was still a youth, whilst in his face the active principle of elongation had continued laborious until long after the term when Nature should have made an end. ‘A glass of wine, captain?’ said Sir Wilfrid. ‘Thank your honour. Need makes the old wife trot, they say, and I feel a-dry--I feel a-dry.’ ‘Put your hat down and sit, Finn. I want you to give my cousin, Mr. Monson, your views respecting this--this voyage. But first, where are we?’ ‘Why,’ answered the captain, balancing the wine-glass awkwardly betwixt a thumb and a forefinger that resembled nothing so much as a brace of stumpy carrots, whilst he directed a nervous look from Wilfrid to me and on to Miss Laura, as though he would have us observe that he addressed us generally; ‘there’s Yarmouth lights opening down over the port bow, and I reckon to be clear of the Solent by about three bells--half-past nine o’clock.’ ‘The navigation hereabouts,’ said I, ‘needs a bright look-out. The captain may not thank us for calling him below.’ ‘Lord love ’ee, Mr. Monson, sir,’ he answered, ‘the mate, Jacob Crimp, him with the one eye slewed--if so be as you’ve noticed the man, sir--he’s at the helm, and I’d trust him for any inshore navigation, from the Good’ens to the Start, blindfolded. Why, he knows his soundings by the smell of the mud.’ ‘How is the weather?’ inquired my cousin.