Again he drank--the bottle being almost empty by this time--and still his mind did not become clouded; still he was able to think and plot and scheme. And once he muttered, "He wishes to participate in my new method of earning a living, not even knowing what that method is. Ah!" he exclaimed, springing to his feet and knocking over the miserable rushlight as he did so, whereby he was now in the dark, "he wishes that. He wishes that! Oh, my God!" he cried, gesticulating in that darkness, "he wishes that to be. And so it shall! So it shall! He shall participate. Somehow, I will do it. He shall participate, even as the sheep--which his accursed, gibbering face is something like--participates with the butcher in the shambles to which it is led. He shall indeed participate." Then, in the darkness, and half-frenzied both with the drink he had already partaken of--which was not the first that day--as well as with the thoughts of a new scheme which had suddenly dawned in his mind, he put out his hand and, groping for the bottle, found it, and drained the last remnants of its contents. After which he stumbled towards where his bed was and sought oblivion in sleep--an oblivion that, however, was not altogether complete--that was disturbed by dreams and visions of a girl's face, a girl's form shaken with piteous sobs; and, also, of a newly made grave in a country churchyard, on which the rain poured without cessation through the night. CHAPTER X. "THE MIGNONNE." Eight months had passed; March of the year 1759 had come, and a bitterly cold east wind blew up Bugsby's Reach, causing the pennons on countless barges and frigates and brigs, to say nothing of great ships of war lying in that classic piece of water, to stream out like pointing fingers towards where, above all else, there glistened in the wintry afternoon sunlight the cross surmounting St. Paul's. It whistled, too, through the shrouds of a French-built frigate, one that in earlier days would have been spoken of as "a tall, rakehelly bark," a fabric that was beautiful in all her lines, in her yacht-like bows and rounded stern, in her lofty masts, stayed with supreme precision; in her shining afterdeck brasswork, her wheel carved and decorated as though the hands of dead-and-gone Grinling Gibbons might have been at work at it; upon, too, her brass capstan and binnacle. A French frigate pierced also with gun ports below, and bearing for her figurehead the face and bust of a smiling, blue-eyed child, which figurehead represented the name she bore upon her bows, _Mignonne_.