upon, and I promised to use my influence to procure for him a
pardon. I went to Mr Farmer, but all my efforts were unavailing. The
culprit passed a sleepless night in the intolerable agony of lear.
Before he was brought up to be flogged, Mr Pigtop had been fully
avenged.

The gratings are rigged, the hands are turned up, and Joshua Daunton is
supported by two ship's corporals in a nearly fainting state, and
stripped by another--he is too much paralysed to do it himself. The
officers are mustered on the break of the quarter-deck, and the marines
are drawn up, under arms, on the gangway. Captain Reud looks fierce and
forbidding, and Mr Farmer, for his generally impassible features,
really quite savage. I come forward shudderingly and look down. The
wandering and restless eyes of the frightened young man meet, in an
instant, what, most probably, they are seeking--my own.

"Ralph Rattlin, speak for me to the captain." The words were in
themselves simple, but they were uttered in a tone of the most touching
pathos. They made me start: I thought that I knew the voice, not as the
voice of Joshua Daunton, the mischievous imp that had tormented us all
so scientifically, but of some dear and long-forgotten friend. "Ralph
Rattlin, speak for me to the captain--this must not be."

"But it shall be, by G---!" said the irascible Creole.

"Captain Reud," said I, "let me entreat you for this once only--"

"Boatswain's mate--"

"Oh, Captain Reud, if you knew what a strange sympathy--"

"The thief's cat."

"Indeed, sir, since he has been on board he has never stolen--"

"Mr Rattlin, another word, and the masthead. Stand back, Stebbins!--
let Douglas give him the first dozen."

Now, this Douglas was a huge, raw-boned boatswain's mate that flogged
left handed, and had also a peculiar jerk in his manner of laying on the
cat-o'-nine-tails, and that always brought away with it little knobs of
flesh wherever the knots fell, and so neatly, that blood would, at every
blow, spout from the wounds, as from the puncture of a lancet. Besides,
the torture was also doubled by first scoring over the back in one
direction, and the right-handed floggers coming after in another. They
cut out the skin in lozenges.

I looked in the captain's face, and there was no mercy; I looked below,
and there appeared almost as little life. After the left-handed
Scotchman had bared his brawny arm and measured his distance, and just
as he was abou