But the gleam in the hunter’s eye died when Lieutenant Dap introduced him to his friend Boldero, who was celebrating with him the birth of his seventh baby, and whose society for the next month would, he was sure, add to the amenities of life in Brandy Hole Creek. And “my friend Boldero” did not fail to become it, for Lieutenant Dap’s cruising was confined to the waters on whose border he had built his nest: and he was frequently hove to. And during those tedious four weeks, made still more tedious by rain, Boldero had himself rowed out more than once to the “Channel groper” whose black hull, copious white boats, formidable guns and flaming-flannelled red-capped crew were plainly visible from the beached lugger; and he moved genially among the blue-trousered tars and did full justice to the Lieutenant’s gin-toddy and had his fingers often in the Lieutenant’s snuff-box and lent a sympathetic ear to his methods and devices against those rascally smugglers with their manœuvre of rowing dead to windward. Their spirit-casks were slung with ropes, the Lieutenant explained, so that their confederates on shore could load them easily on their horses, but only the other night the blockade-men had discomfited a formidable shore-gang of fifty who, despite their stout ashpoles, had been unable to carry off anything except their wounded. He would have caught the lugger, too, had she not kept doubling. The commander of the amphibious _Tommy Devil_ even shared in an exciting, if unsuccessful, chase after a suspicious landing-party, going out with a galley-crew in a rain-storm in a borrowed tarpaulin petticoat. And once the one-eyed hero—who felt himself none the less a Nelson because his eye had been lost in resisting entry into the navy—returned Roger Boldero’s visit, and after broaching sundry of the happily unsealed kegs, the two skippers repaired arm in arm—the attitude was necessary—to see the seventh baby and present the fond mother with material for a lace cap.