“Ay! I ken the wages of a mate weel enou’; I’ve been payin’ ‘em for thirty year come New Year’s day. But ye’ll no need money, Jack!”--the dry, harsh tones grow soft with kindliness--“ye’ll no need money, mon, and there’s the joke of it. For I’m to gi’ ye your one-sixth of the John O’ Gaunt, wi’ never a shillin’ from your fingers, and so make a man and a merchant of ye at a crack. Now, no words, lad! Ye’ve been faithful; and I’ve no’ forgot that off Cape Clear one day ye saved me a ship. Ay! ye’ll ken by now that Jamie Younger, for all he’s ‘lected to Parleyment to tell the King his mind, is no so giddy wi’ his honors as to forget folk who serve him. No words, I tell ye! There ye be, sailor and shipowner baith, before ye’re twenty-one. An’ gude go wi’ ye!” The big-hearted Scotchman smothers the gratitude on the lips of young Jack Paul, and hands him out the door. As the latter goes down the stair, Shipowner Younger calls after him with a kind of anticipatory crow of exultation: “And, lad! if ye get ever to Lunnon, come doon to Westminster, and see me just passin’ the laws!” The _John O’ Gaunt_ lies off the Guinea coast. The last one of its moaning, groaning, black cargo of slaves has come over the side from the shore boats, and been conveyed below. The _John O’ Gaunt_ has been chartered by a Bristol firm to carry three thousand slaves from the Guineas to Kingston; it will require ten voyages, and this is the beginning of the first. The three hundred unhappy blacks who make the cargo are between decks. There they squat in four ranks, held by light wrist-chains to two great iron cables which are stretched forward and aft. There are four squatting ranks of them; each rank sits face to face with its fellow rank across the detaining cable. Thus will they sit and suffer, cramped and choked and half-starved in that tropical hell between decks, through those two-score days and nights which lie between the _John O’ Gaunt_ and Kingston. Captain Denbigh keeps the deck until the anchors are up. The wind is forward of the beam, and now, when its canvas is shaken out, the _John O’ Gaunt_ begins to move through the water on the starboard tack. The motion is slow and sulky, as though the ship were sick in its heart at the vile traffic it has come to, and must be goaded by stiffest gales before it consents to any show of speed. Captain Denbigh leaves the order, “West by north!” with second mate Boggs, who has the watch on deck; and, after glancing aloft at the sails and over the rail at the weather, waddles below to drink “Prosperous voyage!” with his first mate and fellow owner, young Jack Paul. He finds that youthful mariner gloomy and sad.