"We are crossing the great Gulf Stream!" said the captain,--"Jacobs! open one of the stern-ports." "'Tis the very place and time, this is," remarked a good-humoured cotton-grower from the Deckan, "for one of the colonel's tiger-hunts, now!" "Sir!" answered the old officer, rather testily, "I am not accustomed to thrust my _tiger-hunts_, as you choose to call my humble experiences, under people's noses!" "Certainly not, my dear sir," said the planter,--"but what do you say, ladies, to one of the captain's sea-yarns, then? Nothing better, I'm sure, here and now, sir--eh?" Captain Collins smiled, and said he had never spun a yarn in his life, except when a boy, out of matter-of-fact old junk and tar. "Here is my steward, however," continued he, "who is the best hand at it I know,--and I daresay he'll give you one." "Charming!" exclaimed the young ladies; and "What was that adventure, Mr Jacobs," said Miss Alicia, "with a beauty and a Nabob in it, that you alluded to a short time ago?" "I didn't to say disactly include upon it, your ladyship," replied old Jacobs, with a tug of his hair, and a bow not just _à la maître_; "but the captain can give you it better nor I can, seeing as his honur were the Nero on it, as one may say." "Oh!" said the surgeon, rubbing his hands "a lady and a rupee-eater in the case!" "Curious stories, there _are_, too," remarked the colonel, "of those serpents of nautch-girls, and rich fools they've managed to entangle. As for beauty, sir, they have the devil's, and they'd melt the 'Honourable John's' own revenue! I know a very sensible man,--shan't mention his name,--but made of rupees, and a regular _beebee-hater_,--saw one of these--" "Hush, hush, my dear sir!" interrupted the planter, winking and gesticulating; "very good for the weather poop,--but presence of ladies!"--"For which I'm not fit, you'd say, sir?" inquired the colonel, firing up again. "Oh! oh! you know, colonel!" said the unlucky planter, deprecatingly. "But a _godown_[7] of best 'Banda' to a cowrie now, the sailor makes his beauty a complete Nourmahal, with rose-lips and moon-eyes,--and his Nabob a _jehan punneh_,[8] with a _crore_, besides diamonds. 'Twould be worth hearing, especially from a lascar. For, 'twixt you and I, colonel, we know how rare it is to hear of a man who saves his _lac_, now-a-days, with Yankees in the market, no Nawaubs to fight, and reform in _cutcheries_[9]!" "There seems something curious about this said adventure of yours, my dear captain," said Mrs St Clair, archly,--"and a Beauty too! It makes me positively inquisitive, but I hope your fair lady has heard the story?" "Why, not exactly, ma'am," replied Captain Collins, laughing as he caught the doctor looking preternaturally solemn, after a sly lee-wink to the colonel; who, having his back to the moonlight, stretched out his legs and indulged in a grim, silent chuckle, until his royal-tiger countenance was unhappily brought so far _flush_[10] in the rays as to betray a