The next in seniority then removed the pipe from his lips, and smiting the table with a heavy fist, observed, sententiously— “And me, Smoke-Jack, young man. It’s a rum name, ain’t it, for as smart a foretopman as ever lay out upon a yard? but I’ve yarned it, that’s what I sticks to. I’ve yarned it. Here’s your health, lad; I wish ye well.” The three having thus gone through all the forms necessary to induce a long and staunch friendship amongst men of their class, Slap-Jack made a clean breast of it, as if he had known his companions for years. “I _have_ tried it, mates,” said he; “and a queer game it is; but I don’t care how soon I try it again. I suppose I must have been born a landsman somehow, d’ye see? though I can’t make much of that when I come to think it over. It don’t seem nat’ral like, but I suppose it was so. Well, I remember as I runned away from a old bloke wot wanted to make me a sawbones—a sawbones! and I took and shipped myself, like a young bear, aboard of the ‘Sea Swallow,’ cabin-boy to Captain Delaval. None o’ your merchantmen was the ‘Sea Swallow,’ nor yet a man-o’-war, though she carried a royal ensign at the gaff, and six brass carronades on the main-deck. She was a waspish craft as ever you’d wish to see, an’ dipped her nose in it as though she loved the taste of blue water, the jade!—wet, but weatherly, an’ such a picture as you never set eyes on, close-hauled within five points of the wind. First they gammoned me as she was a slaver, and then a sugar-merchant’s pleasure-boat, and sometimes they said she was a privateer, with letters of marque from the king; but I didn’t want to know much about that; King George or King Louis, it made no odds, bless ye; I warn’t a goin’ to turn sawbones, an’ Captain Delaval was _my_ master, that was enough for me! Such a master he was, too! No seaman—not he. His hands were as white as a lady’s, an’ I doubt if he knew truck from taffrail; but with old Blowhard, the master, to sail her, and do what the skipper called swabbing and dirty work, there wasn’t a king’s officer as ever I’ve heard of could touch him. Such a man to fight his ship was Captain Delaval. I’ve seen him run her in under a Spanish battery, with a table set on deck and a awning spread, and him sitting with a glass of wine in his hand, and give his orders as cool and comfortable as you and me is now. ‘Easy, Blowhard!’ he’d sing out, when old ‘Blow’ was sweating, and cursing, and stamping about to get the duty done. ‘Don’t ye speak so sharp to the men,’ says he; ‘spoils their ear for music,’ says he. ‘We’ll be out o’ this again afore the breeze falls, and we’ll turn the fiddles up and have a dance in the cool of the evening.’ Then he’d smile at me, and say, ‘Slap-Jack, you little blackguard, run below for another pineapple; not so rotten-ripe as the last;’ and by the time I was on deck again, he’d be wiping his sword carefully, and drawing on his gloves—that man couldn’t so much as