his pistols.

"Don't be hasty," said the captain. "Don't do a mischief before ye see
the need of it. Ye've a French soldier's coat upon your back and a Scots
tongue in your head, to be sure; but so has many an honest fellow in
these days, and I daresay none the worse of it."

"So?" said the gentleman in the fine coat: "are ye of the honest party?"
(meaning, Was he a Jacobite? for each side, in these sort of civil
broils, takes the name of honesty for its own).

"Why, sir," replied the captain, "I am a true-blue Protestant, and I
thank God for it." (It was the first word of any religion I had ever
heard from him, but I learnt afterwards he was a great church-goer while
on shore.) "But for all that," says he, "I can be sorry to see another
man with his back to the wall."

"Can ye so, indeed?" asked the Jacobite. "Well, sir, to be quite plain
with ye, I am one of those honest gentlemen that were in trouble about
the years forty-five and six; and (to be still quite plain with ye) if I
got into the hands of any of the red-coated gentry it's like it would go
hard with me. Now, sir, I was for France; and there was a French ship
cruising here to pick me up; but she gave us the go-by in the fog--as I
wish from the heart that ye had done yoursel'! And the best that I can
say is this: If ye can set me ashore where I was going, I have that
upon me will reward you highly for your trouble."

"In France?" says the captain. "No, sir; that I cannot do. But where ye
come from--we might talk of that."

And then, unhappily, he observed me standing in my corner, and packed me
off to the galley to get supper for the gentleman. I lost no time, I
promise you; and when I came back into the round-house, I found the
gentleman had taken a money-belt from about his waist, and poured out a
guinea or two upon the table. The captain was looking at the guineas,
and then at the belt, and then at the gentleman's face; and I thought he
seemed excited.

"Half of it," he cried, "and I'm your man!"

The other swept back the guineas into the belt, and put it on again
under his waistcoat. "I have told ye, sir," said he, "that not one doit
of it belongs to me. It belongs to my chieftain," and here he touched
his hat--"and while I would be but a silly messenger to grudge some of
it that the rest might come safe, I should show myself a hound indeed if
I bought my own carcass any too dear. Thirty guineas on the seaside, or
sixty if ye set me on the Linnhe