“As the Thunder was short of hands, the captain was very glad to enter the smart young seaman she seemed to be when she presented herself before him.
“Billy Taylor was aboard, and when she caught sight of his face she had some difficulty in keeping her fingers off it, I believe you. Not that she was otherwise, I’ll have you understand, than a mild tempered woman, when she had her own way, but she had received a good deal of provocation, you’ll allow. The deceiver didn’t know her, and all went on smoothly for some time. She proved herself so smart and active a seaman, (or sea woman,—I should say a mermaid, eh?) that she soon got made captain of the main-top over the head of Billy Taylor and many older hands. How they would have fired up if they had known the truth!
“At last the Thunder sailed down Channel, and my mother began to fancy that all the things she had heard about Taylor might be false, and all her old feeling for him came back. However, as his ill-luck would have it, the ship put into Plymouth Sound, and as she lay there a boat came off from Causand with a lady in it.
“Billy Taylor watched the boat till she came alongside, and when the lady stepped on deck he kissed her lips and folded her in his arms.
“Miss Nailor was standing by. The scene was too much for her.
“‘Oh, you foul traitor!’ she exclaimed, drawing her pistol just as the lady and the deceiver Billy were walking forward hand in hand. ‘Take that!’
“Off went the pistol, and the false lover tumbled over as dead as a herring. The lady, at first, was inclined to go into what the uneducated sailors call high-strikes—you understand, young gentlemen; but she was a strong-minded woman, and when she heard how Billy had been deceiving another girl, she said it served him right, and that she would have nothing more to say to him, dead or alive, and, stepping into her boat, away she went ashore at Causand, where she had come from.
“The captain of the Thunder, when he found out that my mother was a woman, and how she had been treated by Billy Taylor, as the song says, ‘very much approved of what she’d done,’ and declared that she was a fine spirited girl, (which she certainly had proved herself to be), and that he would make her his first-lieutenant as soon as there was a vacancy. You see they did things differently in those days to what they do now. No one ever hears of a young woman being made first-lieutenant, though it is said there are many old women higher up in the list; but it wouldn’t become me, holding the subordinate situation of a boatswain, to credit the fact. The captain very soon had an opportunity of fulfilling his word, for in a very short time the ship went into action, and his next in command being killed, he gave Miss Nailor the death vacancy, and then she became first-lieutenant of the gallant Thunder bomb. However, young gentlemen, I must put a stopper on my jaw-tackle just now. I have had uninvited listeners to my veracious and authentic history, and I hope they have benefited by it.”
Mr Johnson placed his finger on the side of his nose, and winked one of his piercing eyes.
“The fact is, I like to indulge in my faculty of invention and amplification, and you may possibly have an idea that I have done so in the account I have given you of my female parent’s early adventures. Ho! ho! ho!” and he heaved back, and indulged in a long, low, hoarse laugh, such as a facetious hippopotamus might be supposed to produce on hearing a good pun made by an alligator.