dear, there’s stuff in that lad you might cut an admiral out of, and they’re going to make ‘a soger’ of him!” He had contrived to pull the two exhausted swimmers into his little craft; and although Charlie very soon recovered himself, his friend, who was farther gone in his salt-water potations, gave them both some uneasiness before he came thoroughly to his senses. Whilst our hardy seaman is putting them upon their legs, and administering hot brandy-and-water in a fisherman’s house near the beach, we may spare a few lines to give some account of “Hairblower,” and the qualities by which he earned that peculiar designation. Born and bred a fisherman, one of that daring race with which our sea-board swarms, and from which Her Majesty’s navy and the British merchant service recruit their best men, he was brought up from his very childhood to make the boat his cradle, and the wave his home. Wet or dry, calm or stormy, blow high, blow low, with a plank beneath his foot, and a few threads of canvas over his head, he was in his element; and long ere he reached the full strength of manhood he was known for the most reckless of all, even amongst those daring spirits who seem to think life by far the least valuable of their earthly possessions. Twice, as a boy, had he _volunteered_ to make up the crew of a lifeboat when the oldest hands were eyeing with doubtful glances that white, seething surf through which they would have to make their way to the angry, leaden sea beyond; and the men of Deal themselves, those heroes of the deep, acknowledged, with the abrupt freemasonry of the brave, that “the lad was as tough as pin-wire, _heart_ to the backbone.” His carelessness of weather soon became proverbial, and his friends often expostulated with him on his rashness in remaining out at sea with a craft by no means qualified to encounter the sudden squalls of the Channel, or the heavy seas which come surging up from the Atlantic in a real Sou’-Wester. His uncle at length promised to assist him in building a lugger of somewhat heavier tonnage than the yawl he was accustomed to risk, and the _Spanking Sally_, of ill-fated memory, was the result. On the first occasion that the young skipper exultingly stamped his foot on a deck he could really call his own, he earned the nickname by which he was afterwards distinguished. His uncle expressed a hope that the owner would now be a trifle more careful in his ventures, and suggested that when it blew hard, and there was a heavy cargo on board, it was good seamanship to run for the nearest port. “Blow,” repeated the gallant lad, while he passed his fingers through thick glossy curls that the breeze was even then lifting from his forehead--“Blow, uncle! you’ll never catch me putting _my_ helm down for weather, till it comes on stiff enough to blow every one of these hairs clean out of my figure-head!” From that hour, and ever afterwards, he was known by the _sobriquet_ of Hairblower,