ood manners. What do
you want? Why do you stand there staring at me like an idiot? If you
have anything to say, please say it at once, and get about your duty."

"Oho, bedad, just listen to him!" exclaimed the fellow, now thoroughly
aroused. "Get about me juty, is it? By the powers! but there's others
as'll soon find that they'll have to get about their juty, as well as
me!"

I was by this time brought to the end of my patience; I was in a boiling
passion, and would have sprung upon the man there and then, had not Miss
Onslow so strenuously resisted my efforts to release myself from her
hold that I found it impossible to do so without the exercise of actual
violence. At this moment one of the men behind O'Gorman interposed by
muttering:--loud enough, however, for me to hear:

"Don't be a fool, Pete, man! Keep a civil tongue in your head, can't
you; you'll make a mess of the whole business if you don't mind your
weather eye! What's the good of bein' oncivil to the gent, eh? That
ain't the way to work the traverse! Tell him what we wants, and let's
get the job over."

Thus adjured, O'Gorman pulled himself together and remarked, half--as it
seemed--in response to the seaman, and half to me:

"We wants a manny things. And the first ov thim is: How fur are we from
Table Bay?"

"Well," answered I, "if it will afford you any satisfaction to know it,
I have no objection to inform you that we are just one hundred and
eighty miles from it."

"And how fur may we be from the Horn?" now demanded O'Gorman.

"The Horn?" I exclaimed. "What has the Horn to do with us, or we with
the Horn?"

"Why, a precious sight more than you seem to think, mister," retorted
the man, with a swift recurrence to his former insolent, bullying
manner. "The fact is," he continued, without allowing me time to speak,
"we're bound round the Horn; we mean you to take us there; and we want
to know how long it'll be afore we get there."

"My good fellow," said I, "you don't know what you are talking about.
We are bound to Table Bay, and to Table Bay we go, or I will know the
reason why. You may go round the Horn, or to the devil, afterwards, and
welcome, so far as I am concerned."

"Shtop a bit, and go aisy," retorted O'Gorman; "it's yoursilf that
doesn't know what you're talkin' about. I said we're goin' round the
Horn, didn't I? Very well; I repait it, we're goin' round the Horn--in
this brig--and I'd like to know where's the man