“You may say all that, and then make but a short yarn of the truth,” returned the messmate who walked by his side: “if there had been such a thing as a ready-made prayer handy, they would have choused a poor fellow out of the use of it.--I say, Ben, I'll tell ye what; it's my opinion that if a chap is to turn soldier and carry a musket, he should have soldier's play, and leave to plunder a little--now the devil a thing have I laid my hands on to-night, except this firelock and my cutlash--unless you can call this bit of a table-cloth something of a windfall.” “Ay! you have fallen in there with a fresh bolt of duck, I see!” said the other, in manifest admiration of the texture of his companion's prize--“why, it would spread as broad a clew as our mizzen-royal, if it was loosened! Well, your luck hasn't been every man's luck--for my part, I think this here hat was made for some fellow's great toe: I've rigged it on my head both fore and aft, and athwart-ships; but curse the inch can I drive it down--I say, Sam! you'll give us a shirt off that table-cloth?” “Ay, ay, you can have one corner of it; or for that matter, ye can take the full half, Nick; but I don't see that we go off to the ship any richer than we landed, unless you may muster she-cattle among your prize-money.” “No richer!” interrupted a waggish young sailor, who had been hitherto a silent listener to the conversation between his older and more calculating shipmates; “I think we are set up for a cruise in them seas where the day watches last six months; don't you see we have caught a double allowance of midnight!” While speaking, he laid his hands on the bare and woolly heads of Colonel Howard's two black slaves, who were moving near him, both occupied in mournful forebodings on the results that were to flow from this unexpected loss of their liberty. “Slew your faces this way, gentlemen,” he added; “there; don't you think that a sight to put out the binnacle lamps? there's darkness visible for ye!” “Let the niggers alone,” grumbled one of the more aged speakers; “what are ye skylarking with the like of them for? The next thing they'll sing out, and then you'll hear one of the officers in your wake. For my part, Nick, I can't see why it is that we keep dodging along shore here, with less than ten fathoms under us, when, by stretching into the broad Atlantic, we might fall in with a Jamaicaman every day or two, and have sugar hogsheads and rum puncheons as plenty aboard us as hard fare is now.” “It is all owing to that Pilot,” returned the other; “for, d'ye see, if there was no bottom, there would be no pilots. This is dangerous cruising-ground, where we stretch into five fathoms, and then drop our lead on a sand-pit or a rock! Besides, they make night-work of it, too! If we had daylight for fourteen hours instead of seven, a man might trust to feeling his way for the other ten.”