During the progress of this last meal, Colonel Bannister left the table and went below, and after an interval, uprose through the hatch, with his large distinguished-looking wife holding on to him. Mynheer Peter Hemskirk, on seeing her, cried out: ‘Ah, Meestrees Bannister, boot dot iss vot I call plooky!’ and Mr. Johnson came near to breaking his neck whilst starting to his legs to stand as she passed. She took a chair next her husband, and sat grimly staring around her, her lips pale with the compression of them. She shook her head to every suggestion made by the steward, and then, being unable to hold out any longer, seized hold of her little ramrod of a husband and went staggering and rolling below with him. When he returned, he tossed down a glass of wine with an angry gesture and a fierce countenance, and looking at Hemskirk, cried out: ‘I’ve a great respect for my wife, sir, and she’s a fine woman in every sense of the word.’--The Dutchman nodded.--‘But,’ continued the colonel, clenching his fist, ‘if ever I go to sea with a woman again, be she wife, aunt, or grandmother, may I be poisoned for a lunatic, and my remains committed to the deep. This is the fourth time I’ve sworn it--my mind is now resolved!’ Out of all this sort of thing one could get a laugh here and there; but on the whole it was desperately weary work, and continued so till we had blown clear of soundings. Altogether, it was as ugly a down Channel run as any man would pray to be preserved from; the atmosphere grey, the seas a muddy green, the howling blast chill as a November morn, often darkening to a squall, that would sweep between the masts in horizontal lines of rain sparkling like steel, and with spite enough in the lancing of them to compel the strongest to turn his back. Now and again a lady passenger would show in the cuddy; but though there were some twenty-eight of us in all, not reckoning a couple of ayahs, and a Chinaman in the garb of his country, who acted as nurse to one Mrs. Trevor’s baby, never once in those days did above seven of us, barring the skipper and his mates, sit down to a meal. The thick weather lay heavily upon the captain’s mind, held him in fits of abstraction whilst at table, dismissed him after a brief sitting to the deck, and kept him heedful and taciturn whilst there. He had had one collision, and wanted no more; and you would notice how that tragedy had served him, by observing him when in the cuddy to prick up his ears to the least unusual noise on deck, to glance at the tell-tale compass over his head, as though it were the sun which he had been patiently waiting for a chance to ‘shoot,’ to swallow his food with impatient motions to the steward to bear a hand, and to bolt up the cabin steps without a smile or syllable of apology to us for quitting the table. CHAPTER IV LOUISE TEMPLE