vidently incensed and resentful, he flared up the next
moment, and thrusting his huge fist under the youngster's nose, burst
out--

"If you want to know all about it, you young swabber, I may tell you I
stood on the Naiad's gun-deck with better folk than _you_ are ever
likely to come across"--he stamped his foot here as if he had the deck
under him--"when, with one broadside from the Dictator, the three masts
and bowsprit were shot away, and the main deck came crashing down upon
the lower;"--the last sentence was taken from 'Exploits of Danish and
Norwegian Naval Heroes,' and the old man was as proud of these lines as
he would have been of a medal.

"When the crash came," he pursued, always in the same posture, and in
the manner of the sacred text, "he who stands here and tells the tale
had but just time to save himself by leaping into the sea through a
gun-port."

But he threw off then the trammels of the text, and continued _in
propria persona_, violently gesticulating with his fists, and steadily
advancing all the time, while Salve prudently retreated before his
advance down to the boat.

"We don't deal in lies and fabricate stories out here like you, you
young whipper-snapper of a ship's cub; and if it wasn't for your father,
who has sense enough to rope's-end you himself, I'd lay a stick across
your back till you hadn't a howl left in you."

With this finale of the longest speech to which he had given vent for
thirty years perhaps, he turned with a short nod to the father, and went
into the house again.

Elizabeth was miserable that Salve should go away like this, without so
much as deigning to say good-bye to her. And her grandfather was cross
enough himself; for he was afraid that he had done something foolish,
and broken with the lighterman.

CHAPTER III.

Salve came out to the rock again the next autumn, after a voyage to
Liverpool and Havre.

At first he was rather shy, although his father and old Jacob Torungen
had in the interval, in spite of that little affair of the previous
year, been on the best of terms. The white bear, however, as he called
him, seemed to have altogether forgotten what had passed; and with the
girl he was very easily reconciled--she had learnt now not to tell
everything to her grandfather.

Whilst the lighterman and old Jacob enjoyed a heart-warming glass
together in the house, Salve carried the things up to the cellar,
Elizabeth following him up and down every ti