The night came. The “Jessie Maxwell” was heeling over to a spanking breeze, and in her cabin the lamp was lighted, and Captain Duff and his chief officer, an Orkney Islander named Banks, a huge, rough, shaggy, honest-looking being, as like a Newfoundland dog as it is possible for a man to be, sat, each with a big glass of whisky and water at his elbow, smoking pipes. Here was a very different interior from what the “Meteor” had presented. The cabin was about twenty feet long and six feet high, with a broad skylight overhead, and half a dozen sleeping berths around. No gilt and cream colour, nor polished panels, nor Brussels carpets, nor the hundred elegancies of decoration and furniture, that made the “Meteor’s” cuddy as pretty as a drawing-room, were to be found; but solid snuff-coloured doors, with stout hair-cushioned sofas on either side the table that travelled up and down a couple of portly stanchions, so that, when it was not wanted, it could be stowed out of the road. But how suggestive, every plank and beam that met the eye, of strength and durability! Here was a vessel fit to trade in any seas, well manned, with a snugly-stowed cargo, not a quarter of a ton in excess of what she ought to carry, commanded by a shrewd and able seaman out of Glasgow, and by two mates as competent as himself. The steam from the toddy mingled the fragrance of lemon and honest Glenlivet with the more defined aroma of cavendish tobacco. The captain sat on one sofa and Banks on the other; and they smoked and sipped, and looked steadfastly on one another, as if time were altogether too precious to be wasted in conversation, which must oblige them to devote their lips to other purposes than the pipe-stem and the tumbler. “I think I did well to get that boat inboard,” said the skipper presently; “a boat’s a boat.” There was no controverting this position; so Mr. Banks acquiesced with a nod, which he executed like Jove, in a cloud. “Do you remember the time, Banks,” observed the skipper after a long pause, “when little Angus McKay spun us that yarn in the “Bannockburn,” about his falling in with a ship’s long-boat off the Cape of Good Hope, with a nigger boy and three sheep aboard of her?” Mr. Banks, after deep deliberation, replied that he minded the story weel. “A verra curious circumstance,” continued the skipper, “if it wasn’t a lee!” Another pause, during which the two men sucked their pipes, never remitting their steadfast gaze at each other, unless to turn their eyes upon the tumblers before raising them to their lips. “Mr. Sherman seems to know what he is about,” said Captain Duff. “He has a fund of humanity in his bosom, and I like to reflect, sir, on his sitting by the poor de’il’s bed watching by him as though he were his ain son.”