“Well, upon my honour, Captain O’Loughlin——”
“Oh, bother with your Captain! If you go on with any more of that nonsense, I must give you up. Call me Patrick or O’Loughlin, but to the deuce with my captainship! What did you laugh in that manner for? by Jove, you shook all the wind out of the royals!”
“The idea of a boy, scarcely seventeen, in love with a full-grown Demoiselle Française, of nineteen! You are dreaming, or, what’s deuced more likely, you are in love with her yourself.”
“Devil a doubt of it, my lad, I confess; but you look so sweet at one another. Isn’t there the other little girl? She will, in four or five years, be tolerably good looking; she has fine eyes, at all events. She will never forget you, and, by Jove, you may depend on it, she will have lots of cash!”
“By Jove, O’Loughlin, you are pitching into the future, like a jolly boat in a head sea—manufacturing a wife for me five or six years off. I don’t intend,” continued our hero, “to get married till I am a post captain—perhaps an admiral.”
“Tare and nouns! If you wait till you are an admiral, with perhaps a leg and an arm or an eye less than your complement, she must be a tidy craft that will take you in tow. Hollo! There’s a squall!”
As he spoke, the boatswain’s whistle was heard, the men hurrying up, whilst O’Loughlin gave rapid orders to take in the royals, and furl the top-gallant sails, for the ship heeled over to a very sudden and singular kind of squall, that struck the water within a few yards of them. In a few minutes the sea was feather white, squall after squall coming over its hitherto tranquil surface. But the Babet was rapidly got under double-reefed topsails, and top-gallant masts housed, and was standing away to the westward, close hauled.
“By St. Patrick, how suddenly this gale has come on,” observed Captain O’Loughlin to the first mate, William Thornton having gone below to reassure their passengers, who were alarmed by the sudden, and, indeed, violent heeling over of the corvette.
“Yes, sir,” returned the mate, an old and experienced sailor; “but common enough in the Mediterranean. I should not be surprised if it increased to a very heavy gale; it’s looking exceedingly black to windward.”
“She’s a steady craft under canvas, Mr. Holder.”