The wooded April banks of the Rappahannock are flourishing in the new green of an early Virginia spring. The bark _Two Friends_, Captain Jack Paul, out of Whitehaven by way of Lisbon, Madeira, and Kingston, comes picking her dull way up the river, and anchors midstream at the foot of the William Jones plantation. Almost coincident with the splash of the anchors, the _Two Friends_ has her gig in the water, and the next moment Captain Jack Paul takes his place in the stern sheets. “Let fall!” comes the sharp command, as he seizes the tiller-ropes. The four sailors bend their strong backs, the four oars swing together like clockwork, and the gig heads for the plantation landing where a twenty-ton sloop, current-vexed, lies gnawing at her ropes. At twenty-six, Captain Jack Paul is the very flower of a quarter-deck nobility. He has not the advantage of commanding height; but the lean, curved nose, clean jaw, firmly-lined month, steady stare of the brown eyes, coupled at the earliest smell of opposition with a frowning falcon trick of brow like a threat, are as a commission to him, signed and countersigned by nature, to be ever a leader of men. In figure he is five feet seven inches, and the scales telling his weight consent to one hundred and forty-five pounds. His hands and feet are as small as a woman’s. By way of offset to this, his shoulders, broad and heavy, and his deep chest arched like the deck of a whale-back, speak of anything save the effeminate. In his movements there is a feline graceful accuracy> with over all a resolute atmosphere of enterprise. To his men, he is more than a captain; he is a god. Prudent at once and daring, he shines a master of seamanship, and never the sailor serves with him who would not name him a mariner without a flaw. He is born to inspire faith in men. This is as it should be, by his own abstract picture of a captain, which he will later furnish Doctor Franklin: “Your captain,” he will say, when thus informing that philosopher, “your captain, Doctor, should have the blind confidence of his sailors. It is his beginning, his foundation, wanting which he can be no true captain. To his men your captain must he prophet, priest and king. His authority when off-shore is necessarily absolute, and therefore the crew should be as one man impressed that the captain, like the sovereign, can do no wrong. If a captain fail in this, he cannot make up for it by severity, austerity or cruelty. Use force, apply restraint, punish as he may, he will always have a sullen crew and an unhappy ship.”