“No, no, no?” cried Harry.
“Then come below to breakfast, boys.”
“Why,” said Mavers, “you’ve almost taken away my appetite.”
“And mine too,” said Harry Milvaine.
“Stay,” exclaimed the doctor, “I will restore it. Listen.”
He threw himself into an attitude as he spoke.
“Sweetly, oh, sweetly the morning breaks
With roseate streaks,
Like the first faint blush on a maiden’s cheeks.
Alas! that ever so fair a sun
As that which its course has now begun
Should gild with rays, so light and free,
That dismal dark-frowning gallows-tree.”
“I’m not sure,” said Mavers, laughing, “that you haven’t made matters worse. But come along, we’ll go below, anyhow.”
The Bunting, as her name implies, was only a little bit of a gunboat, but to the slave-dealing dhows she became the scourge of the seas in the Indian Ocean, all the way south from Delagoa Bay, to Brava and Magadoxa in the north.