“Well!—what then?”
“I tied up the mouth, and put him overboard—out of the midship lower-deck port, sir.”
“Yes—but he would not sink?” said Daddy.
“Oh, sir,” cried the butcher, now entering fully into the merciless spirit of his trade, “I put a four-and-twenty-pound shot into the bag along with Shakings.”
“Did you?—Then, Master Butcher, all I can say is, you are as precious a rascal as ever went about unhanged. There—drink your grog, and be off with you!”
Next morning when the officers were assembled at breakfast in the ward-room, the door of the captain of marines’ cabin was suddenly opened, and that officer, half shaved, and laughing through a collar of soap-suds, stalked out, with a paper in his hand.
“Here,” he exclaimed, “is a copy of verses, which I found just now in my basin. I can’t tell how they got there, nor what they are about;—but you shall judge.”
So he read the two following stanzas of doggerel:—
“When the Northern Confed’racy threatened our shores,
And roused Albion’s Lion, reclining to sleep,