a
word in reply, his companion, while lolling over the settee, caught up
an opera-glass from the table, and, placing it to his eyes, went on:

"Ha! ho! the fore-top-mast of my pretty long-legged schooner is gone.
Pretty stick it was! I suppose, Master Gibbs, that _you_"--he nodded
fiercely without removing the glass--"cut it up for that lovely new leg
you've mounted. Ay, my beauty!" again apostrophizing the vessel, which
lay like a wounded bird in the calm inlet before him; "but where's my
handsome barge, that used to cover the long gun? Ho! stormy weather
you've seen of late."

During all this one-sided conversation Gibbs had managed to wriggle his
mutilated body on to a wicker chair, where he steadied himself with his
crutch, evincing manifest signs of choler the while by running his fat
fingers through the reddish door-mat of hair, hitching up his trowsers,
and rapping nervously his timber stump of a leg on the floor, until at
last, unable, apparently, longer to control himself, he burst out, with
his bad face suffused with passion,

"I say, Captain Brand, it's time to end them 'ere gibes. What's took
place is unfortinate; but, howsoever, I has a bag of shiners and a
wooden leg to show for it, and d----n the odds."

"Stop, stop, my bull-dog! Don't be profane in my presence, if you
please. We are both Christians, you know, and friends too, I hope."

This was said in a very precise, emphatic, and clear enunciation, and
without apparent heat; and Captain Brand smiled too--but such a smile,
as his wide mouth came down with a twitch at the corners, and left a
sort of hole, where the cigar was habitually stuck, to see his teeth
through.

"And now, my friend, suppose you give me some little account of your
cruise, and fill up, if you can, any chinks that I haven't seen through
already," he concluded, throwing his legs again over the back of the
settee, and elevating his eyebrows as the cigar smoke curled in spiral
wreaths around his face.

Mr. Gibbs hereupon settled himself more at ease in his chair, laid his
crutch across his knees, and began:

"I s'pose, sir, you got the news I sent in a letter from Matanzas, after
we'd been chased out of the Nicholas Channel by that Yankee corvette?"

Captain Brand nodded at the eye-bolt which held the green silk rope from
the ceiling, as if calculating mentally the strain it would bear, merely
as a matter of philosophical speculation, perhaps.

"Well, arter that--and a very