"Not he. The ship wants a navigator," replied Captain Layard, with a cheerfulness supremely inconsequential. "If you do not come," said the French boatswain, in his native speech, "I will call the men up, and they will throw you into the boat." "Why can't you speak in English?" said Captain Layard. "He'll understand you, and we can follow your meaning." The French mate turned on his heel and was beginning to walk slowly forward. As a cat springs when started by a dog, so sprang the barque's boatswain upon his brother's murderer. With the strength of the fiends before they were cast out he rushed the bleeding scoundrel to the rail and yelled to his men. The French mate grasped the mizzen-shrouds and struggled and kicked in awful silence; but in less than a minute three stout sailors, out of the four who manned the boat's oars, swarmed up. Eight enraged hands then tore the French mate from the mizzen-rigging as the sweep of the hurricane uproots a tree. All in a heap, struggling, wrestling, groaning, they got him past the after-swifter, and to an order, shrieked through his teeth by the French boatswain, they hoisted him lengthwise to the rail, and dropped him into the boat. The French boatswain then made a sort of salaam bow to the captain and Hardy, and the whole four disappeared in the twinkling of an eye over the side amid shouts of laughter from the seamen who had been washing down the decks. "Get all sail upon her, Mr. Hardy," said Captain Layard; "but I shall keep my topsail to the mast for awhile until I see what they mean to do with that barque." The sailors dropped their buckets and scrubbing-brushes, and fell to howling at the halliards. Topgallant and royal-yards rose, the mainsail was left to swing with its clews aloft, and the _York_ was now a full-rigged ship, hove to, but clothed to her trucks, leaning with the swell as though by swaying she was knitting her frame together for the start. A ship when under sail on the ocean is alive; watch her closely and you will discover that she has human intelligence in her methods of helping, and at the same time influencing, the reason that governs the helm and incarnate walks the quarter-deck or bridge. It was about a quarter-past seven; the sailors resumed the business of washing down; the decks sparkled as the brine flashed along the planks, and the boatswain stimulated this sweetening process by the inspiriting language of the land of the slush-lamp. The captain stood right aft watching the receding figure of the barque's fat boat. The placid heave of the deep was crisped by the delicate crumbling foam curling from low, blue brows to the gentle gushing of the pleasant breeze, like some scene of swelling land enamelled with white flowers; the blankness to leeward had melted into azure, and it was all blueness and brightness, and you heard a song that was sweet with its summer note upon the harp-strings of the lofty spars.