The two surgeons came up, opened his dress, felt his pulse, and shook their heads; the boats crews grouped around them--he was lifted into his gig, the word was given to shove off, and--I returned to my broom-cutters. When we got on board, the gunner who had the watch was taking his fisherman’s walk on the starboard side of the quarterdeck, and kept looking steadily at the land, as if to avoid seeing poor little Duncan’s coffin, that lay on a grating near the gangway. The crew, assisted by thirty men from the flag-ship, were employed in twenty different ways, repairing damages, and were bustling about, laughing, joking, and singing, with small regard to the melancholy object before their eyes, when Mr Douglas put his head up the ladder--“Now, Jackson, if you please.” The old fellow’s countenance fell as if his heart was wrung by the order he had to give. “Aloft there! lie out, you Perkins, and reeve a whip on the starboard yard-arm to lower Mr”--The rest stuck in his throat, but, as if ashamed of his softheartedness, he threw as much gruffness as he could into his voice as he sung out--“Beat to quarters there!--knock off, men!” The roll of the drum stayed the confusion and noise of the people at work in an instant, who immediately ranged themselves, in their clean frocks and trowsers, on each side of the quarterdeck. At a given signal, the white deal coffin, wrapped in its befitting pall, the meteor flag of England, swung high above the hammock nettings between us and the bright blue sky, to the long clear note of the boatswain’s whistle, which soon ending in a short chirrup, told that it now rested on the thwarts of the boat alongside. We pulled ashore, and it was a slight perchance to move a woman, to see the poor little fellow’s hat and bit of a dirk lying on his coffin, whilst the body was carried by four ships boys, the eldest scarcely fourteen. I noticed the tears stand in Anson’s eyes as the coffin was lowered into the grave,--the boy had been wounded close to him,--and when we heard the hollow battle of the earth on the coffin,--an unusual sound to a sailor,--he shuddered. “Yes, Master Cringle,” he said, in a whisper, “he was as kind hearted, and as brave a lad as ever trod on shoe leather,--none of the larkings of the men in the clear moonlight nights ever reached the cabin through him,--nor was he the boy to rouse the watch from under the lee of the boats in bad weather, to curry with the lieutenant, while he knew the look-outs were as bright as beagles,--and where was the man in our watch that wanted baccy while Mr Duncan had a shiner left?” The poor fellow drew the back of his horny hand across his eyes, and grumbled out as he turned away, “And here am I, Bill Anson, such a swab as to be ashamed of being sorry for him.”