muttered Ben, as he slowly trotted down the rigging.

The sun came up glowing like a ball of fire. The land wind died away
long before it fluttered far off from the island, and, saving the uneasy
clatter at times of the loose sails and running gear, all remained as
before. It was getting on toward eight o'clock, and while the cook was
dishing the breakfast mess for the crew beneath an awning forward of the
quarter-deck, the captain came up from his cabin below. The stalwart old
seaman stepped to the bulwarks, and, shading his eyes with his hand from
the glare, he took a broad glance over the water to seaward, nodded to
the mate, and said, in a cheerful voice,

"Dull times, matey! No signs of a breeze yet, eh?"

"No, captain," said Mr. Binks; "dead as ditch water; not been enough air
to lift a feather since you went below at four o'clock. But we have
sagged inshore by the current a few leagues during the night, and here's
old Jamaica plain in sight broad off the bow."

"Well, it's not so bad after all, a forty-four days' passage--so I'll
tell my Lady Bird passenger."

Going to the latticed door of the deck cabin, the jolly skipper threw it
wide open, clapped his hands together thrice, and then, placing them to
his mouth like a speaking-trumpet, he bellowed out, in a deep, low
roar,

"Heave out there, all hands! Heave out, Lady Bird and baby! Land ho!"

There came a joyous note from a soft womanly voice within a screen drawn
across the after cabin, mingled with a little cooing grunt from a child,
and presently an inner door swung back, and the sweetest little tot of a
boy came tumbling out into the open space, and sprang at once into the
captain's arms. The little fellow buried his brown curly head into the
old skipper's whiskers, and then, kicking up his fat naked legs, he
laughed and chattered like a magpie.

"Aha! you young scamp, this small nose smells the oranges and cinnamon,
eh? And dear lazy mamma shuts her pretty eyes, and won't look for papa,
and so near home, too!"

Here Madame Rosalie's low sweet voice trilled out merrily in a slightly
foreign accent, while the contralto tones vibrated on the ear like the
note of a harp.

"Ah! _bon capitaine_, how could you deceive me? Still, I forgive you for
telling me last night that we were so far from Kingston. When you know,
too," she went on in her Creole accent, "how I love and want to see my
dear husband these last four years, since you carried him away in