les, twisting his long limbs awkwardly as he
shifted his position on the windlass.

"Now, then, shipmates, don't go for to ax it," said Briant, remaining
immovable. "Don't I know wot's best for ye? Let me spaake to ye now.
Did any of ye iver study midsin?"

"No!" cried several with a laugh.

"Sure I thought not," continued Phil, with a patronising air, "or ye'd
niver ask for the bread--kid out o' saisin. Now I was in the medical
way meself wance--ay, ye may laugh, but it's thrue--I wos 'prentice to a
'pothecary, an' I've mixed up more midsins than would pisen the whole
popilation of owld Ireland--barrin' the praists, av coorse. And didn't
I hear the convarse o' all the doctors in the place? And wasn't the
word always--`Be rigglar with yer mails--don't ait, avic, more nor three
times a day, and not too much, now. Be sparin'.'"

"Hah! ye long-winded grampus," interrupted Dick Barnes, impatiently.
"An' warn't the doctors right? Three times a day for sick folk, and six
times--or more--for them wot's well."

"Hear, hear!" cried the others, while two of them seized Briant by the
neck, and thrust him forcibly towards the after-hatch. "Bring up the
kid, now; an' if ye come without it, look out for squalls."

"Och! worse luck," sighed the misused assistant, as he disappeared.

In a few minutes Phil returned with the kid, which was a species of tray
filled with broken sea-biscuit, which, when afloat, goes by the name of
"bread."

This was eagerly seized, for the appetites of sailors are always sharp,
except immediately after meals. A quantity of the broken biscuit was
put into a strainer, and fried in whale-oil, and the men sat round the
kid to enjoy their luxurious feast, and relate their adventures--all of
which were more or less marvellous, and many of them undoubtedly true.

The more one travels in this world of ours, and the more one reads of
the adventures of travellers upon whose narratives we can place implicit
confidence, the more we find that men do not now require, as they did of
old, to draw upon their imaginations for marvellous tales of wild,
romantic adventure, in days gone by, travellers were few; foreign lands
were almost unknown. Not many books were written; and of the few that
were, very few were believed. In the present day men of undoubted
truthfulness have roamed far and wide over the whole world, their books
are numbered by hundreds, and much that was related by ancient
travellers, but