"Seeing Mr Aldridge on his way back shortly after, I came down the rigging, more anxious than ever to have my own matter settled; indeed, Captain Wallis no sooner caught sight of my face, uncomfortable as I daresay it looked, than he told me he was going to wait on the Admiral aboard the _Hebe_, and would take me with him at once, if I chose. For my part, I needed nothing but the leave, and in ten minutes' time I found myself, no small mark of curiosity, betwixt the waist and the quarter-deck of the _Hebe_, where the officers eyed me with as little appearance of rudeness as they could help, and I overhauled the spars and rigging aloft as coolly as I could, waiting to be sent for below. The _Hebe_, in fact, was the very beauty of a twenty-eight; taking the shine, and the wind, too, clean out of everything even at Plymouth, where I had seen her once a year or two before; our poor dear old _Iris_ herself had scarce such a pattern of a hull, falling in, as it did, from the round swell of her bilge, to just under the plank-sheer, and spreading out again with her bright black top-sides, till where the figure-head shot over the cutwater, and out of her full pair of bows, like a swan's neck out of its breast. As for the _Iris_, our boatswain himself one day privately confessed to me, almost with tears in his eyes, that she tumbled home a thought too much just in front of the fore-chains, and he'd tried to get it softened off with dead planking and paint, but it wouldn't do; everybody saw through them. The truth was, to feel this fine ship under one, with her loose topsails hanging high against the gloom of the red gully towards Longwood, and the gay little town peeping just over her larboard bow, a mile away, it somehow or other cleared one's mind of a load. "I was thinking already how, if one had the command of such a craft, to do something with her at sea--hang it! but surely that old judge couldn't be too proud to give him a fair hearing. By Jove! thought I--had one only wild enough weather, off the Cape, say--if I wouldn't undertake to bother even a seventy-four a whole voyage through, till she struck her flag; in which case a fellow might really venture to hold his head up and speak his mind, lovely as Violet Hyde would be in Calcutta. But then, again, _there_ was St Helena towering red and rough over the ships, with the grand French Emperor hidden in it hard and fast, and all the work he used to give us at an end!