with! Now, Mr Finch," added I, coolly, and still mouthing my stick as before--for I couldn't help wishing to give the conceited fellow a rub, while I lent him a hint--"for my own part, I can't know much of these things, but it _does_ seem to me as if my uncle's notions pretty well suited the case in hand!" Finch was too much of a fair seaman not to catch my drift at once, but in too great a passion to own it at the time. "D'ye think, sir," said he, with a face like fire, "so much sense as there is in this long rigmarole of yours, that I'm such a--that's to say, that I didn't know it before, sir? But what I've got to do with _you_, Mr Collinson, or whatever your name may be--you may have been at sea twenty years, for aught I care--but I'd like to know _why_ you come aboard here, and give yourself out for as raw a greenhorn as ever touched ropes with a kid glove?" "Well, Mr Finch," said I, "and what's that to you, if I choose to be as green as the North Sea whaling-ground?" "Why, sir," said Finch, working himself up, "you're devilish cunning, no doubt, but perhaps you're not aware that a passenger under a false rig, in an Indiaman, may be clapped in limbo, if the captain thinks fit? Who and what are you, I ask?--some runaway master's mate, I suppose, unless you've got something deeper in hand! Perhaps," ended he, with a sneer, "a pickpocket in disguise?" "Sir," said I, getting up off the bulwark I'd been leaning upon, "at _present_ I choose to be a cadet, but, at any rate, you shall make an apology for what you said just now, sir!" "Apology!" said the mate, turning on his heel, "I shan't do anything of the sort! You may be thankful, in the mean time, if I don't have you locked up below, that's all! Perhaps, by the bye, sir, all you wanted was to show off your seamanship before the young lady in the round-house there?" Here the glance the fellow gave me was enough to show he knew pretty well, all the while, what we were matched against each other for.