“As you will,” he said, and he came as near to achieving a careless laugh as a man in his extreme condition ever could. “In with the knife, then, butcher. Thou art aching to carve me up, I can see. Well, well; it were better that you had your way, for I suppose you’ll give me no peace till you’ve done it. But plague take you! You’re tenacious devils, you women. Your damnable iteration would wear away stone. You know the place, and it’s embedded in the thick of my back, I think. Now, mind you cut deep enough. Oh, but I say, good Mistress Surgeon, prithee, where be thy basin?” By the time the victim had mentioned these among other details of the torture he was about to undergo, the eavesdropper on the ladder had seen and heard rather more than enough for his personal comfort. Therefore, he quitted his station on the top rung but one, and descended to the ground as speedily as he could, lest he should involuntarily become the horrified witness of the knife at its work. When he came down to Will Jackson, he was shaking as one with the ague. “I shall not want ye to go up to-night, my lad,” he stuttered; “to-morrow will do. Now, take away the ladder. You careless varlet, did I not tell you to make no sound?” The clumsy fellow had had the misfortune to hit the top of the ladder against the nose of “The Sea Rover,” scowling in crude colours from the signboard of the inn. He appeared, not inappropriately it must be confessed, the most ill-favoured pirate that ever twirled a sword. [Illustration: CHAPTER V _Shows the inconveniences that may sometimes attend an active mind_] The landlord went indoors to his accustomed fireside chair. He was chilled to the blood; every infirmity that lurked in the gross bulk of him was up in arms against his late impudence; and worse, his nerves seemed all tattered and torn in his brain. He had been privileged to see and hear a little too much. Ha! they were already at it, curse them! The moans of the poor wretch upstairs were penetrating to his ears. Or were they the moans of the sea, sounds he had heard every night these forty years? Now and then he thought he heard a muffled, desperate cry. After all, it might be only the wild fowl on the rocks. How he wished he could rid his imagination of the scene that was being enacted. Would that he had not struggled up the ladder at all! Lord! were they never going to have done? It was enough to make a man revolt against his clay. At this acute moment, however, Cicely appeared with her master’s nightly potation. It soothed his qualms somewhat. Pah! he had got the nerves of a girl. It was merely a little blood-letting; quite an everyday matter.