‘If you will remain on deck, I shall be able to get away from him if he should prove tedious, by telling him that I have you to look after.’ ‘What do you imagine he wishes to say?’ she exclaimed with a face of alarm that came very near to consternation. I could only answer with a helpless shrug of the shoulders, and the next minute I had entered Captain Braine’s cabin. ‘Pray sit you down,’ said he. He pulled off his straw hat and sent it wheeling through the air into a corner, as though it were a boomerang, and fell to drying his perspiring face upon a large pocket-handkerchief; then folding his arms tightly across his breast, and crooking his right knee whilst he dropped his chin somewhat, he stood gazing at me under the shadow of his very heavy eyebrows with a steadfastness I could only compare to the stare of a cat’s eye. ‘Well, Captain Braine,’ said I in an off-hand way, though I watched him with the narrowness of a man who goes in fear, ‘what now is it that I am to hear from you? Do you propose to ask me more questions on navigation and seamanship?’ ‘Mr. Dugdale,’ he exclaimed, speaking very slowly, though the excitement that worked in him rendered his voice deep and unusually clear and loud, ‘I have come to the conclusion that you are a gentleman very well able to sarve me, and by sarving me to sarve yourself. I’ve been a-turning of it over in all hours of the day and a good many hours in the night, too, since the moment when ye first stepped over the side, and I’ve resolved to take ye into my confidence.’ He nodded, and stood looking at me without speech for a few moments; then seated himself near me and leaned forwards with a forefinger upon his thumb in a posture of computing. ‘It was in the year 1831,’ he began, ‘that I was third-mate aboard of a ship called the _Ocean Monarch_. We sailed from London with a cargo of mixed goods, bound to the port of Callao. Nothing happened till we was well round to the west’ards of Cape Horn, when the ship was set afire by the live cinders of the cabin stove burning through the deck. The cargo was of an inflammable kind. In less than two hours the vessel was in a blaze from stem to starn, by which time we had got the boats over, and lay at a distance waiting for her to disappear. There was two boats, the long-boat and a jolly-boat. The long-boat was a middling big consarn, and most of the men went in her along with the captain, a man named Matthews, and the second mate, a foreign chap named Falck. In our boat was the chief mate, Mr. Ruddiman, myself, two sailors, and a couple of young apprentices. We was badly stocked with water and food; and after the _Ocean Monarch_ had foundered, Captain Matthews sings out to Mr. Ruddiman to keep company. But it wasn’t to be done. The long-boat ran away from us, and then she hove-to and took us in tow; but there came on a bit of a sea, and the line parted, and next morning we was alone.’ He paused.