‘Yes; I had a couple of years of it.’ ‘Wish _I’d_ been a sailor, I know,’ said he. ‘I mean, after I’d given it up. As to _being_ a sailor--merciful goodness! think of four, perhaps five months of _this_.’ ‘Oh, you’ll be as good a sailor as ever a seaman amongst us in a day or two,’ said I encouragingly. ‘Don’t feel like it now, though,’ he exclaimed. ‘Let’s see: I think you said you were going out to do some painting?--Oh no! I beg pardon: it was a chap named Emmett who told me that. You--you----’ He looked at me with a slightly inebriated cock of the head, from which I might infer that the ‘pull’ he had taken at his flask was by no means his first ‘drain’ within the hour. ‘No,’ said I, with a laugh; ‘I am going out to see an old relative up country. And not more for that than for the fun of a voyage.’ ‘The _fun_ of the voyage!’ he echoed with a stupid face; then with a sudden brightening up of his manner, though his gloomy countenance quickly returned to him, he exclaimed, ‘I say, Dugdale--beg pardon, you know; no good in _mistering_ a chap that you’re going to sleep with for four or five months--call me Colledge, old fellow--but I say, though, seen anything more of that ripping girl since dinner? By George! what eyes, eh?’ He drew his legs up, and with a slight groan composed himself in a posture for sleep, manifestly heedless of any answer I might make to his question. I lingered awhile in the berth, and then, filling a pipe, mounted to the saloon, and made my way to the quarter-deck to smoke in the shelter of the recess in the cuddy front. Colonel Bannister lay sprawling upon a sofa, holding a tumbler of brandy grog. There were other passengers in the cuddy, scattered, and all of them grimly silent, staring hard at the lamps, yet with something of vacancy in their regard, as though their thoughts were elsewhere. As I stepped on to the quarter-deck, the cries and chorusing of men aloft, came sounding through the strong and hissing pouring of the wind between the masts and through the harsh seething of the seas, which the bows of the ship were smiting into snowstorms as she went sullenly ploughing through the water with the weather-leech of the maintopgallant-sail trembling in the green glancings of the moonlight like the fly of a flag in a breeze of wind. They were taking a reef in the fore and mizzen topsails. The chief mate, Mr. Prance, from time to time, would sing out an order over my head that was answered by a hoarse ‘Ay, ay, sir,’ echoing out of the gloom in which the fore-part of the ship was plunged. I lighted my pipe and sat myself down on the coamings of the booby hatch to enjoy a smoke. I was alone, and this moon-touched flying Channel night-scene carried my memory back to the times when I was a sailor, when I had paced the deck of such another vessel as this, as a midshipman of her. It seemed a long time ago, yet it was no more than six years either. The old professional instinct was quickened in me by the voices of the