"Oh, very soon--a deuced deal too soon for you," said Mr. Bitts. "To-morrow a tug will take us to the Nore, and next day will find us in the Channel--and here comes old Toggle the Pilot," said Grummet, as a stout personage, enveloped in many coats and wraps, came tumbling over the side, with a rubicund and weatherbeaten face, and made his way direct for the grog, which as a preliminary to everything, waited him, as he knew, in the cabin. It is not an uncommon thing for the captain of a sea-going ship, calling the roll, to find several of his men absent, having been either too intoxicated to sail, or having broken their articles and disappeared, and such deficiencies are then made up by the crimps at Gravesend, as no vessel can go to sea short-handed; but this was never the case with Phil Talbot, who was one of the most popular merchant commanders belonging to the mighty Port of London. Ere long the Nore was left behind, and Derval had his first instalment of the odious mal-du-mer amid the heavy seas of the English Channel, and with a longing and somewhat of an envious heart, he saw old Toggle the Pilot quit the ship and go off to Deal in his boat, waving a farewell with his tarpaulin hat--the last link with old England. Even the glorious sea is becoming somewhat prosaic now in these our days of steam, telegraphy, and extreme colonisation; yet it was the fortune of Derval Hampton to see much that was stirring, perilous and even terrible, ere he had the down of manhood on his upper lip. The family at Finglecombe knew that the _Amethyst_, had sailed for Rio de Janeiro. Greville Hampton, who was neither destitute of humanity nor of natural interest in his first-born, duly announced the fact, as seen among the "Shipping Intelligence" in his morning paper, and it set Mrs. Hampton thinking--thinking--as she fondled her rather cross-tempered little Rookleigh. She thought on the contingencies consequent to a sailor's life, separated from death by a six-inch plank, as Juvenal has it--an idea reproduced by Dr. Samuel Johnson--the collisions, fires, founderings, the chances of lee-shores, of floating hulls and icebergs in the dark; the countless chances too of drowning or dying by climate and disease. She had read too in the papers that "in the five years ending June last, 5,028 ships had gone to the bottom with every man on board, making 6,469 souls," and she thought there were a good many chances against Derval Hampton--the eldest born--ever darkening his father's door again. But there was one chance, or mischance rather, on which she had not calculated, and which startled the soul of Greville to its inmost depth, when he read on another morning a paragraph worded thus:-- "The ship _Amethyst_ of London, outward bound, spoken with in Latitude 13° 17' S. and Longitude 33° 27' W., by Curry & Co.'s ship _Wanderer_, all well, save that a death had happened. A boy had fallen from aloft and perished." * * * * * CHAPTER IV.