Seated between these imposing pillars of the state, sat, in tribulation dire, a tall, awkward young man, in an elaborately-worked white smock-frock, stained with blood in front and upon the shoulders. He was the personification of rural distress. He blubbered _a pleine voix_, and lifted up and lowered his handcuffed wrists with a see-saw motion really quite pathetical. Though the wind had fallen, yet the tide was running strongly, and there was a good deal of sea, quite enough to make the motion in the boat very unpleasant. As they held on alongside by the rope, the parties in the stern-sheets began bobbing at each other, the staves lost and resumed, and then lost again, their perpendicular-- so much, indeed, as to threaten the head of the clerk, whose countenance "began to pale its effectual fire." The captain and many of the officers looking over the gangway, the following dialogue ensued, commenced by the officer of the watch. "Shore-boat, ho-hoy!" "In the name of the king," replied the clerk, between many minacious hiccoughs, and producing a piece of paper, "I have brought you a _volunteer_, to serve in his Majesty's fleet;" pointing to the blubberer in the smock-frock. "Well," said the captain, "knock off his irons, and hand him up." "Dare not, sir--as much as my life is worth. The most ferocious poacher in the country. Has nearly beaten in the skull of the squire's head gamekeeper." "Just the sort of man we want," said the captain. "But you see he can't get up the side with his hands fast; and I presume you cannot be in much danger from the volunteer, whilst you have two such staves, held by two such constables." "Yes," said the now seriously-affected clerk; "I do not think that I incur much danger from the malefactor, since I am under the protection of the guns of the frigate." So, somewhat reassured by this reflection, the brigand of the preserves was unmanacled, and the whole party, clerk, constables, and prisoner, came up the side and made their appearance on the break of the quarter-deck. But this was not effected without much difficulty, and some loss,--a loss that one of the parties must have bewailed to his dying day, if it did not actually hasten that awful period. One of the constables, in ascending the side, let fall his staff, his much-loved staff, dear to him by many a fond recollection of riot repressed, and evildoer apprehended, and away it went, floating with the tide, far, far astern. His unmitigated horror at this event was comic in the extreme, and the keeper of the king's peace could not have evinced more unsophisticated sorrow than did the late keeper of his conscience at the loss of the Seals, the more especially as the magistrate's clerk refused to permit the boat to go in pursuit of it, not wishing the only connecting link between him and the shore to be so far removed from his control. CHAPTER THIRTY TWO.