I must inform the reader that my father's person was very much altered from what I have described it to have been at the commencement of this narrative. He was now a boatswain's mate, and wore a silver whistle hung round, his neck by a lanyard, and with which little Virginia was then playing. He had grown more burly in appearance, spreading, as sailors usually do, when they arrive to about the age of forty; and moreover, he had a dreadful scar from a cutlass wound, received in boarding, which had divided the whole left side of his face, from the eyebrow to the chin. This gave him a very fierce expression; still he was a fine looking man, and his pig-tail had grown to a surprising length and size. His ship, as I afterwards found out, had not been paid off, but he had obtained a fortnight's leave of absence, while she was refitting. We were all very sociable together, without there being the least idea, on the part of my sister and myself, with whom we were in company, when in rolled old Ben the Whaler. "Sarvice to you," said Ben, nodding to my father. "Tommy, get me a pipe of 'baccy." "Here's pipe and 'baccy too, messmate," replied my father. "Sit down, and make yourself comfortable, old chap." "Won't refuse a good offer," replied Ben, "been too long in the sarvice for that--and you've seen sarvice too, I think," continued Ben, looking my father full in the face. "Chop from a French officer," replied my father; after a pause, he added, "but he didn't live to tell of it." Ben took one of the offered pipes, filled, and was soon very busy puffing away, alongside of my father. CHAPTER FIVE. MY FATHER AND MOTHER MEET AFTER AN ABSENCE OF SIX YEARS. SHE DISCOVERS THAT HE IS NO LONGER A COXSWAIN BUT A BOATSWAIN'S MATE. While my father and Ben are thus engaged, I will give the reader a description of the latter. Ben was a very tall, broad-shouldered old fellow, but stooping a little from age: I should think he must have been at least sixty, if not more; still, he was a powerful, sinewy man. His nose, which was no small one, had been knocked on one side, as he told me, by the flukes (i.e., tail) of a whale, which cut in half a boat of which he was steersman. He had a very large mouth, with very few teeth in it, having lost them by the same accident; which, to use his own expression, had at the time "knocked his figure-head all to smash." He had sailed many years in the whale fisheries, had at last been pressed, and served as quarter-master on board of a frigate for eight or nine years, when his ankle was broken by the rolling of a spar in a gale of wind. He was in consequence invalided for Greenwich. He walked stiff on this leg, and usually supported himself with a thick stick. Ben had noticed me from the time that my mother first came to Fisher's Alley; he was the friend of my early days, and I was very much attached to him. A minute or two afterwards my father pushed the pot of porter to him. Ben drank, and then said--