ome down on top o' the smack. I hadn't time to
call or think. I remember the smack heeling over, and me standing on the
gunwale pushing against the ship's side as if I hoped to bear her off.
Then the square of an open port, with a lantern in it, slid by in front
of my nose. I kicked back on our gunwale as it went under and slipped
through that port into the French ship--me and my fiddle.'

'Gracious!' said Una. 'What an adventure!'

'Didn't anybody see you come in?' said Dan.

'There wasn't any one there. I'd made use of an orlop-deck port--that's
the next deck below the gun-deck, which by rights should not have been
open at all. The crew was standing by their guns up above. I rolled on
to a pile of dunnage in the dark and I went to sleep. When I woke, men
was talking all round me, telling each other their names and sorrows
just like Dad told me pressed men used to talk in the last war. Pretty
soon I made out they'd all been hove aboard together by the press-gangs,
and left to sort 'emselves. The ship she was the Embuscade, a
thirty-six-gun Republican frigate, Captain Jean Baptiste Bompard, two
days out of Le Havre, going to the United States with a Republican
French Ambassador of the name of Genet. They had been up all night
clearing for action on account of hearing guns in the fog. Uncle Aurette
and Captain Giddens must have been passing the time o' day with each
other off Newhaven, and the frigate had drifted past 'em. She never knew
she'd run down our smack. Seeing so many aboard was total strangers
to each other, I thought one more mightn't be noticed; so I put Aunt
Cecile's red cap on the back of my head, and my hands in my pockets like
the rest, and, as we French say, I circulated till I found the galley.

'"What! Here's one of 'em that isn't sick!" says a cook. "Take his
breakfast to Citizen Bompard."

'I carried the tray to the cabin, but I didn't call this Bompard
"Citizen." Oh no! "Mon Capitaine" was my little word, same as Uncle
Aurette used to answer in King Louis' Navy. Bompard, he liked it. He
took me on for cabin servant, and after that no one asked questions; and
thus I got good victuals and light work all the way across to America.
He talked a heap of politics, and so did his officers, and when this
Ambassador Genet got rid of his land-stomach and laid down the law
after dinner, a rooks' parliament was nothing compared to their cabin. I
learned to know most of the men which had worked the French Re