PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. VOL. 100. January 24, 1891. MR. PUNCH'S PRIZE NOVELS. NO. XII.--THE MATE OF THE MARLINSPIKE. (_BY SHARK MUSSELL; AUTHOR OF "ERECT WITH A STOVE IN HER," "MY GYP MADE TO WHEEZE," "THE ROMANCE OF A PENNY PARLOUR," "A HOOK FOR THE BANNOCK," "FOUND THE GAL ON FIRE," "THE MYSTERY OF THE LOTION JAR," "THE JOKES O' LEAD," &C., &C., &C._) ["Here you are, my hearty," writes the Author, "this is a regular briny ocean story, all storms and thunderclaps and sails and rigging and soaring masts and bellying sails. How about 'avast heaving' and 'shiver my timbers,' and 'son of a sea-cook,' and all that? No, thank you; that kind of thing's played out. MARRYAT was all very well _in his day_, but that day's gone. The public requires stories about merchant ships, and, by Neptune, the public shall have them, with all kinds of hairy villains and tempest-tossed wrecks and human interest and no end of humour, likewise word-pictures of ships and storms. That's me. So clear the decks, and here goes."] CHAPTER I. We were in mid-ocean. Over the vast expanses of the oily sea no ripple was to be seen although Captain BABBIJAM kept his binoculars levelled at the silent horizon for three-quarters of an hour by the saloon clock. Far away in the murky distance of the mysterious empyrean, a single star flashed with a weird brilliance down upon the death-like stillness of the immemorial ocean. Yet the good old _Marlinspike_ was rolling from side to side and rising and falling as if the liquid expanse were stirred by the rush of a tempest instead of lying as motionless as a country congregation during the rector's sermon. Suddenly Captain BABBIJAM closed his binoculars with an angry snap, and turned to me. His face showed of a dark purple under his white cotton night-cap. [Illustration] "The silly old ship," he muttered, half to himself and half to me, "is trying to make heavy weather of it; but I'll be even with her. I'll be even with her." "You'll find it a very _odd_ thing to do," I said to him, jocosely. He sprang at me like a seahorse, and reared himself to his full height before me. "Come, Mr. TUGLEY," he continued, speaking in a low, meaning voice, "can you take a star?" "Sometimes," I answered, humouring his strange fancy; "but there's only one about, and it seems a deuce of a long way off--however, I'll try;" and, with that, I reached my arm up in the direction of the solitary planet, which lay in the vast obscure like a small silver candlestick, with a greenish tinge in its icy sparkling, mirrored far below in the indigo flood of the abysmal sea, while a grey scud came sweeping up, no one quite knew whence, and hung about the glossy face of the silent luminary like the shreds of a wedding veil, scattered by a honey-moon quarrel across the deep spaces far beyond the hairy coamings of the booby-hatch.