“Oh, Annie, for his sake will you not marry me?”
Annie o’ the Banks o’ Dee wept just a little, then she wiped her tears away. He took her hand, and she half-whispered: “What must be must—’tis fate.”
Chapter Eleven.
The “Wolverine” Puts out to Sea.
With the exception of the Sunbeam, probably no more handsome steam yacht ever left Southampton Harbour than the Wolverine. She was all that a sailor’s fancy could paint.
Quite a crowd of people were on the quay to witness her departure on her very long and venturesome cruise. Venturesome for this reason, that, though rigged as a steam barque, she was but little over four hundred tons register.
Seamen on shore, as they glanced at her from stem to stem, alow and aloft, criticised her freely. But Jack’s opinion was on the whole well embodied in a sentence spoken by a man-o’-wars-man, as he hitched up his nether garments and turned his quid in his mouth:
“My eyes, Bill and Elizabeth Martin, she is a natty little craft! I’ve been trying to find a flaw in her, or a hole, so to speak, but there’s ne’er a one, Bill—above water, anyhow. Without the steam she reminds me of the old Aberdeen clippers. Look at her bilge, her lines, her bows, her jibboom, with its smart and business-like curve. Ah, Bill, how different to sail in a yacht like that from living cooped up in a blooming iron tank, as we are in our newest-fashioned man-o’-war teakettles! Heigho! Blowed if I wouldn’t like to go on board of her! Why, here is the doctor—splendid young fellow!—coming along the pier now. I’ll overhaul him and hail him. Come on, Bill!”