the boatswain's
back. He turned sharply round, but did not discover the speaker. He
shook his fist in that direction, however, with a comic expression in
his eye, saying--

"Bouncer or no bouncer, mister whoever you are, I beg that you'll
understand clearly, that I will allow no man, whoever he may be, to
labour under the misapprehension that I ever depart one tenth of a point
from the strict line of truth; and that reminds me that I promised you,
Mr Merry, and you, Mr Grey, to narrate an event which occurred during
the next voyage I made. I wasn't long in finding a ship, for the
certificates with which the owners of the Diddleus had furnished me were
highly satisfactory; in fact, merit like mine couldn't, in those days,
languish in obscurity; though, by the bye, I ought not exactly to sing
my own praises; but when a man has a due consciousness of his own
superior talents, the feeling will ooze out now and then, do all he can
to conceal it. Things are altered now: merit's claims are no longer
allowed, or I should be living on shore now." Mr Johnson pointed
significantly at the Admiral's pen.

"Ah! oui! I vonce read of von great man, Sinbad de Sailor, and von oder
man, Captain Lemuel Gulliver. You vary like dem gentlemen," observed
Colonel Pinchard, with the politest of bows, to the boatswain.

"Sinbad! and Gulliver!" shouted the boatswain indignantly. "If there
are two fellows whose names I hate more than others, they are those.
Take them all in all, I consider them, without exception, the biggest
liars who have ever lived; and if there is a character I detest more
than another, it is that of a man who departs in the slightest degree
from the truth; no one can longer have confidence in what he says: and,
for my own part, I'd rather lose my right hand, and my head into the
bargain, than have the shadow of a reason for supposing that the words I
was uttering would run the remotest chance of not being implicitly
believed."

The boatswain's eye kept rolling round on his auditory with a
self-satisfied glance, and a twinkle withal, as much as to say, "You I
care about understand me perfectly, and if there are any geese who
don't, they are welcome to swallow all they can digest."

"Ah! I had just found a fresh ship. She was the Lady Stiggins, a fine
brig, well armed, and bound round Cape Horn. We had a somewhat roving
commission, and were first to touch out here at Jamaica, and one or two
others of these gems