oman,
when she had her own way, but she had received a good deal of
provocation, you'll allow. The deceiver didn't know her, and all went
on smoothly for some time. She proved herself so smart and active a
seaman, (or sea woman,--I should say a mermaid, eh?) that she soon got
made captain of the main-top over the head of Billy Taylor and many
older hands. How they would have fired up if they had known the truth!

"At last the Thunder sailed down Channel, and my mother began to fancy
that all the things she had heard about Taylor might be false, and all
her old feeling for him came back. However, as his ill-luck would have
it, the ship put into Plymouth Sound, and as she lay there a boat came
off from Causand with a lady in it.

"Billy Taylor watched the boat till she came alongside, and when the
lady stepped on deck he kissed her lips and folded her in his arms.

"Miss Nailor was standing by. The scene was too much for her.

"`Oh, you foul traitor!' she exclaimed, drawing her pistol just as the
lady and the deceiver Billy were walking forward hand in hand. `Take
that!'

"Off went the pistol, and the false lover tumbled over as dead as a
herring. The lady, at first, was inclined to go into what the
uneducated sailors call high-strikes--you understand, young gentlemen;
but she was a strong-minded woman, and when she heard how Billy had been
deceiving another girl, she said it served him right, and that she would
have nothing more to say to him, dead or alive, and, stepping into her
boat, away she went ashore at Causand, where she had come from.

"The captain of the Thunder, when he found out that my mother was a
woman, and how she had been treated by Billy Taylor, as the song says,
`very much approved of what she'd done,' and declared that she was a
fine spirited girl, (which she certainly had proved herself to be), and
that he would make her his first-lieutenant as soon as there was a
vacancy. You see they did things differently in those days to what they
do now. No one ever hears of a young woman being made first-lieutenant,
though it is said there are many old women higher up in the list; but it
wouldn't become me, holding the subordinate situation of a boatswain, to
credit the fact. The captain very soon had an opportunity of fulfilling
his word, for in a very short time the ship went into action, and his
next in command being killed, he gave Miss Nailor the death vacancy, and
then she became first-lie