"The man was brought on board," proceeded Sir Joseph, "sure enough, with a hen-coop--on which he had been found floating. The poor wretch was blue with terror and exposure in the water; he fainted when we lifted him on deck. When he came to himself he told us a horrible story. He was a sick and destitute foreign seaman, and he had hidden himself in the hold of an English vessel (bound to a port in his native country) which had sailed from Liverpool that morning. He had been discovered, and brought before the captain. The captain, a monster in human form, if ever there was one yet--" Before the next word of the sentence could pass Sir Joseph's lips, Turlington startled the little party in the cabin by springing suddenly to his feet. "The breeze!" he cried; "the breeze at last!" As he spoke, he wheeled round to the cabin door so as to turn his back on his guests, and hailed the deck. "Which way is the wind?" "There is not a breath of wind, sir." Not the slightest movement in the vessel had been perceptible in the cabin; not a sound had been audible indicating the rising of the breeze. The owner of the yacht--accustomed to the sea, capable, if necessary, of sailing his own vessel--had surely committed a strange mistake! He turned again to his friends, and made his apologies with an excess of polite regret far from characteristic of him at other times and under other circumstances. "Go on," he said to Sir Joseph, when he had got to the end of his excuses; "I never heard such an interesting story in my life. Pray go on!" The request was not an easy one to comply with. Sir Joseph's ideas had been thrown into confusion. Miss Lavinia's contradictions (held in reserve) had been scattered beyond recall. Both brother and sister were, moreover, additionally hindered in recovering the control of their own resources by the look and manner of their host. He alarmed, instead of encouraging the two harmless old people, by fronting them almost fiercely, with his elbows squared on the table, and his face expressive of a dogged resolution to sit there and listen, if need be, for the rest of his life. Launce was the person who set Sir Joseph going again. After first looking attentively at Richard, he took his uncle straight back to the story by means of a question, thus: "You don't mean to say that the captain of the ship threw the man overboard?" "That is just what he did, Launce. The poor wretch was too ill to work his passage. The captain declared he would have no idle foreign vagabond in his ship to eat up the provisions of Englishmen who worked. With his own hands he cast the hen-coop into the water, and (assisted by one of his sailors) he threw the man after it, and told him to float back to Liverpool with the evening tide." "A lie!" cried Turlington, addressing himself, not to Sir Joseph, but to Launce. "Are you acquainted with the circumstances?" asked Launce, quietly.