asure of Admiral Bluewater's company, advice and
assistance?"

"An inferior never can know, Sir Gervaise, where it may suit the
pleasure of his superiors to order him."

"That distinction of superior and inferior, Bluewater, will one day lead
you into a confounded scrape, I fear. If you consider Charles Stuart
your sovereign, it is not probable that orders issued by a servant of
King George will be much respected. I hope you will do nothing hastily,
or without consulting your oldest and truest friend!"

"You know my sentiments, and there is little use in dwelling on them,
now. So long as the quarrel was between my own country and a foreign
land, I have been content to serve; but when my lawful prince, or his
son and heir, comes in this gallant and chivalrous manner, throwing
himself, as it might be, into the very arms of his subjects, confiding
all to their loyalty and spirit; it makes such an appeal to every nobler
feeling, that the heart finds it difficult to repulse. I could have
joined Norris, with right good will, in dispersing and destroying the
armament that Louis XV. was sending against us, in this very cause; but
here every thing is English, and Englishmen have the quarrel entirely to
themselves. I do not see how, as a loyal subject of my hereditary
prince, I can well refrain from joining his standard."

"And would _you_, Dick Bluewater, who, to my certain knowledge, were
sent on board ship at twelve years of age, and who, for more than forty
years, have been a man-of-war's-man, body and soul; would you now strip
your old hulk of the sea-blue that has so long covered and become it,
rig yourself out like a soldier, with a feather in your hat,--ay,
d----e, and a camp-kettle on your arm, and follow a drummer, like one of
your kinsmen, Lord Bluewater's fellows of the guards?--for of sailors,
your lawful prince, as you call him, hasn't enough to stopper his
conscience, or to whip the tail of his coat, to keep it from being torn
to tatters by the heather of Scotland. If you _do_ follow the
adventurer, it must be in some such character, since I question if he
can muster a seaman, to tell him the bearings of London from Perth."

"When I join him, he will be better off."

"And what could even _you_ do alone, among a parcel of Scotchmen,
running about their hills under bare poles? Your signals will not
man[oe]uvre regiments, and as for man[oe]uvring in any other manner, you
know nothing. No--no; stay where you are,