and calm, and bright, and within half-an-hour the tern and sea-gulls
were fishing over the reef and skimming and swooping above the prismatic
waters as before.

CHAPTER XII.

"Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire;
... so shall inferior eyes,
That borrow their behaviours from the great,
Grow great by your example, and put on
The dauntless spirit of resolution."
_King John_, V. i.

"Creaky doors" are said to "hang long," and leaky ships may enjoy a
similar longevity. It certainly was a curious fact that the _Water-Lily_
hardly suffered in that storm, though the damage done to shipping was
very great. Big and little, men-of-war and merchantmen, very few escaped
scot-free, and some dragged their anchors and were either on the reef in
the harbour, or ran foul of one another.

Repairs were the order of the day, but we managed to get ours done and
to proceed on our voyage, with very little extra delay.

I cannot say it was a pleasant cruise, though it brought unexpected
promotion to one of the Shamrock three. In this wise:

The mate was a wicked brute, neither more nor less. I do not want to
get into the sailor fashion of using strong terms about trifles, but to
call him less than wicked would be to insult goodness, and if brutality
makes a brute, he was brute enough in all conscience! Being short-handed
at Bermuda, we had shipped a wretched little cabin-boy of Portuguese
extraction, who was a native of Demerara, and glad to work his passage
there, and the mate's systematic ill-treatment of this poor lad was not
less of a torture to us than to Pedro himself, so agonizing was it to
see, and not dare to interfere; all we could do was to aid him to the
best of our power on the sly.

The captain, though a sneaking, unprincipled kind of man, was neither so
brutal nor, unfortunately, so good a seaman as the mate; and the
consequence of this was, that the mate was practically the master, and
indulged his Snuffy-like passion for cruelty with impunity, and with a
double edge. For, as he was well aware, in ill-treating Pedro he made us
suffer, and we were all helpless alike.

His hold over the captain was not from superior seamanship alone. The
_Water-Lily_ was nominally a "temperance" vessel, but in our case this
only meant that no rum was issued to the crew. In the captain's cabin
there was pl