then I eyes the chap a bit, and then says I to him, (for I began to feel somehow at seeing my wife kissed all round before my face without saying by your leave,) an' says I to him, (rather angrily,) look ye, Mr. Marine, if you don't take your ugly mouth farther off from my wife, I'll just punch it with the butt end of my rifle! thunder and oons, you great sea lobster that you are, don't you see that I married her only two days ago just as she stands, bones and all, and you to come at this time o' day to claim a part on her!" [B] Brown loaf. The marine, however, had come from the wars as a man of peace--he had already been at her father's, and learnt all that had befallen her, and, in place of provoking the rifleman's further ire, he sought an amicable explanation, which was immediately entered into. It appeared that Nancy and he had been married some three years before; that the sloop of war to which he belonged was ordered to the West Indies, and while cruising on that station an unsuccessful night attempt was made to cut out an enemy's craft from under a battery, in the course of which the boat in which he was embarked having been sent to the bottom with a thirty-two pound shot, he was supposed to have gone along with it, and to be snugly reposing in Davy Jones's locker. His present turn up, however, proved his going down to have been a mistake, as he had succeeded in saving his life at the expense of his liberty, for the time being; but the vessel, on her voyage to France, was captured by a British frigate bound for India, and the royal marine became once more the servant of his lawful sovereign. In the meanwhile Nancy had been duly apprised of his supposed fate by some of his West Indian shipmates--she was told that she might still hope; but Nancy had no idea of holding on by any thing so precarious--she was the wife of a sailor, had been frequently on board a ship, and had seen how arbitrarily every thing, even time itself, is made subservient to their purposes, and she determined to act upon the same principle, so that, as the first lieutenant authorizes it to be eight o'clock after the officer of the watch has reported that it is so, in like manner did Nancy, when her husband was reported dead, order that he should be so; but it would appear that her commands had about as much influence over her husband's fate as the first lieutenant's had over time, from his making his untoward appearance so early in her second honey-moon. As brevity formed no part of the narrator's creed, I have merely given an outline of the marine's history, such as I understood it, and shall hasten to the conclusion in the same manner.