“What, don’t you know, Bo?” answered Bill; “I thought any one with half an eye could have seen that. Why, he’s been and courted the niece of the skipper of the brig there, and soon they’ll be going and getting spliced, and then good-bye to the ‘Frolic.’ She’ll be laid up to a certainty. It’s always so. The young gentlemen as soon as they comes into their fortunes goes and buys a yacht. We’ll always be living at sea, say they. It goes on at first very well while they’ve only friends comes aboard, but soon they takes to asking ladies, and soon its all up with them. Either they takes to boxing about in the Channel, between the Wight and the main; for ever up and down anchor, running into harbour to dine, and spending the day pulling on shore, waiting alongside the yacht-house slip for hours, and coming aboard with a cargo of boat-cloaks and shawls, or else, as I have said, they goes and gives up the yacht altogether.” Old Sleet gave a munch at his grub and then replied,—“But if I don’t judge altogether wrong by the cut of this here young lady’s jib, I don’t think she’s one of those who’d be for wishing her husband to do any such thing. When she came aboard of us, t’other day, she stepped along the thwarts just as if she’d been born at sea. Says I to myself, when I saw her, she’s a sailor’s daughter, and a sailor’s niece, and should be a sailor’s wife; but if what you say is true, Bo, she’s going to be next door to it, as a chap may say, and that’s the wife of a true, honest yachtsman. No, no, there’s no fear, she won’t let him lay up the ‘Frolic,’ depend on’t.”
“Well, I hope so,” observed Frost; “I should just like to have a fine young girl like she aboard, they keeps things alive somehow, when they are good, though when they are t’other they are worse than one of old Nick’s imps for playing tricks and doing mischief.”
“You are right there again, and no mistake, Bo,” answered Sleet. “I once sailed with a skipper who had his wife aboard: I never seed such goings on before nor since. The poor man couldn’t call his soul his own, or his sleep his own. She was a downright double-fisted woman, a regular white sergeant. She wouldn’t allow a drop of grog to be served out without she did it, nor a candle end to be burned without logging it down; she almost starved the poor skipper—she used to tell him it was for his spirit’s welfare. He never put the ship about without consulting her. One day, when it was blowing big guns and small-arms, she was out of sorts, and says he—
“‘Molly, love, I think we ought for to be shortening sail, or we may chance to have the masts going over the sides.’
“‘Shorten sail?’ she sings out, ‘let the masts go, and you go with them, for what I care. Let the ship drive, she’ll bring up somewhere as well without you as with you.’
“The poor skipper hadn’t a word to say, but for his life he daren’t take the canvas off the ship.
“‘My love, it blows very hard,’ says he again, in a mild, gentle voice.
“‘Let it blow harder,’ answers the lady; and you might have supposed it was a boatswain’s mate who’d swallowed a marlinspike who spoke.
“Presently down came the gale heavier than ever on us. Crack, crack, went the masts, and in another second we hadn’t a stick standing.
“‘Where’s the ship going to drive to, now?’ asks the skipper, turning to his wife. ‘I’ve been a fool a long time, but I don’t mean to be a fool any longer; just you get the ship put to rights, or overboard you go.’