ition, if the Fates
were kind.

The frigate's orders were--Halifax with despatches; thereafter, the
West India Station for an indefinite time. Six or eight weeks at
Halifax, varied by some knocking about off the Nova Scotia coast, did
not tend to relax Watty's depression, but rather the contrary. For just
before the frigate took her departure from those latitudes a lately
received Portsmouth journal which reached the midshipmen's berth had
recorded the arrest on a serious charge of, amongst others, a woman
giving her name as "Mrs. Walter Scott, licensee of the Goat's Head
Tavern, Portsmouth." Now the Goat's Head Tavern was that little inn
where in an evil moment the three lads had taken up their abode before
the sailing of the _Sirius_, and to Watty it appeared as if his disgrace
must now be spread abroad by the four winds of heaven.

It was mental relief to get away out to sea, and to feel that now at
least there was again some probability of the excitement of an action.
To Bermuda, thence to Jamaica, were the orders; and surely in no part of
the world was a ship of war more certain of active employment. Those
were days removed by no great number of years from Rodney's famous
victory over de Grasse, and not yet had we completed the reduction of
the French West India Islands; the greatest glutton of fighting could
scarce fail to have his fill.

One night, after the frigate had left Bermuda, it had come on to blow
desperately hard from the north-west, and with every hour the gale
increased, till at length--when sail after sail, thundering and
threshing, had come in--the ship lay almost under bare poles, straining
in every timber and nosing her weather bow into the mountainous seas
that swept by at intervals, ere they roared away into the murk to
leeward.

It was the middle watch, and Watty had been standing for some time
holding on by the lee mizzen rigging, peering eagerly into the darkness.

"I've thought two or three times, sir, that I can see something to
leeward of us," he reported to the officer of the watch.

And presently the "something"--a mere patch of denser black in a
darkness emphasized more than relieved by the grey-white crests of
breaking seas--resolved itself into a large vessel, which as day broke
was seen to be a frigate, like themselves under the shortest of canvas,
and with all possible top-hamper down on deck. Pitching and rolling
heavily, she lay; sometimes, as a sea struck her, half buried