"Well, then you will have an opportunity of returning at your leisure. You wished to take me almost as much out of my course; or, if not absolutely out of my course, quite as much out of my time. I have as little relish for Plymouth as you seem to have for Jamaica."
"But, the stranger may be a Frenchman--now, I look at him, he has a French look."
"If he should be French, he will treat you well. It will be exchanging beef for soup-maigre for a week or two. These Frenchmen eat and drink as well as you English."
"But, Capt. Wallingford, their prisons! This fellow, Bonaparte, exchanges nobody this war, and if I get into France I am a ruined man!"
"And if I had gone into Plymouth, I fear I should have been a ruined man, too."
"Remember, we are of the same blood, after all--people of the same stock--just as much countrymen as the natives of Kent and Suffolk. Old Saxon blood, both of us."
"Thank you, sir; I shall not deny the relationship, since it is your pleasure to claim it. I marvel, however, you did not let your cousin's ship pass without detaining her."
"How could I help it, my dear Wallingford? Lord Harry is a nobleman, and a captain, and what could a poor devil of a lieutenant, whose commission is not a year old, do against such odds! No--no--there should be more feeling and good-fellowship between chaps like you and me, who have their way to make in the world."
"You remind me of the necessity of being in motion.--Adieu, Mr. Sennit--cut, Moses!"
Marble struck a blow with the axe on-the studding-sail halyards, and away the Dawn glided, leaving the boat tossing on the waves, twenty fathoms further astern, on the very first send of the sea. What Mr. Sennit said, I could not hear, now, but I very plainly saw him shake his fist at me, and his head, too; and I make no manner of doubt, if he called me anything, that he did not call me a gentleman. In ten minutes the boat was fully a mile astern. At first Sennit did not appear disposed to do anything, lying motionless on the water, in sullen stillness; but wiser thoughts succeeded, and, stepping his two masts, in less than twenty minutes I saw his sails spread, and the boat making the best of its way to get into the track of the stranger.