Mr Lawrence, with a ridiculing smile, said: "What do you know about waiting on people in the cabins of ships?" "What I did should be to your honour's satisfaction. I could lay a cloth and set a dish, and I'd learn in as many hours as much as it would take others days." "But you were never at sea. You'll be sick in your hammock, and I shall be wanting some one to wait upon me." "Oh yes, your honour, I've been to sea," answered Paul with prodigious earnestness. "I've been in smacks. I've knocked about all my life in boats belonging to this Harbour. Sick! No fear, your honour. I'll sarve you for nothing." Mr Lawrence looked at the red-headed, monkey-faced, pleading creature, not, in that look designing, it was manifest, to give him the berth; but all on a sudden his face slightly changed, an idea seemed to flash up in him and work in his countenance, just as a light kindled suddenly within a mask made of something transparent might, by the intention of the artist, change its look. "What's your name again?" he said. "Paul, your honour," answered the fellow, brightening instinctively with the face Mr Lawrence now viewed him with. "No other name?--no matter; Paul will do very well for the books." He mused a little with his eyes fastened upon the ship's decks. For a space he was deeply sunk in thought. Presently his eyes rose to the figure before him, and he examined him as curiously as though he had never before seen him. "Be here," said he, "on Saturday next. It may be that I'll give you the berth. No more words. Off with you!" The fellow made a dash with his hand at a red forelock, and in his crooked gait went through the gangway and walked away up to the wharf, just as Mr Eagle rose out of the main-hatch. Mr Lawrence walked to "The Swan." The entrance was under a covered way into which the stage coach drove for baiting. Mr Lawrence walked into the bar and observed a letter fixed in a frame of red tape stretched across a board covered with green baize. As he was in the habit of receiving letters at this house he looked at this one and saw that it was addressed to him. He pulled it out of its mesh of tape, and addressing a middle-aged, comely woman who sat in the window in the bar where she supplied lookers-in with pots of frothing beer, or directed them to such parts of the house as they desired to visit, he asked when that letter had been left, and was answered that the letter carrier had brought it in about two hours before.