who daily bore her off to a favourite resort among
the cliffs, and there played with her.

One day, on reaching his place of retirement, he was surprised to find a
man in possession before him. Drawing nearer, he observed that the man
also had a baby in his arms.

"Why, I declare, it's Edward Young!" he exclaimed, on going up.

"Of course it is," said the midshipman, smiling, as he held his own
little daughter Jane aloft. "Do you think you are to have it all to
yourself? And do you imagine that yours is the only baby in the world
worth looking at?"

"You are right, Young," returned Christian, with the nearest approach to
a laugh he had made for years. "Come now," he added, sitting down on a
rock, and placing little Moll tenderly in the hollow of his left arm, so
as to make her face his friend, "let's set them up, and compare notes;
isn't she a beauty?"

"No doubt of it whatever; and isn't mine ditto?" asked the midshipman,
sitting down, and placing little Poll in a similar position on his right
arm.

"But, I say, if you and I are to get on amicably, we mustn't praise our
own babies. Let it be an agreement that you praise my Poll, and I'll
praise your Moll. Don't they make lovely _pendants_! Come, let us
change them for a bit."

Christian agreeing to this, the infants were exchanged, and thereupon
these two fathers lay down on the soft grass, and perpetrated practical
jokes upon, and talked as much ineffable nonsense to, those two
whitey-brown balls, as if they had been splendid specimens of orthodox
pink and white. It was observed, however, by the more sagacious of the
wondering gulls that circled round them, that a state of perfect
satisfaction was not attained until the babies were again exchanged, and
each father had become exclusively engrossed with his own particular
ball.

"Now, I say, Fletcher," remarked Young, rising, and placing himself
nearer his friend, "it's all very well for you and me to waste our time
and make fools of ourselves here; but I didn't merely come to show off
my Polly. I came to ask what you think of that rumour we heard last
night, that there has been some sort of plotting going on among the
Otaheitan men."

"I don't think anything of it at all," replied Christian, whose
countenance at once assumed that look of gravity which had become
habitual to him since the day of the mutiny. "They have had too good
reason to plot, poor fellows, but I have such faith in their native