ne breeze, just the thing to send us along, although we do not need it,
going under steam."

"I'm glad you like it, Jack!" said Harry with a wry face, "but I can't say
that I do. You may be used to the water, but I am not."

"I have never been at sea before," laughed Jack, "so I cannot be any more
used to it than you are. Perhaps you have been eating too much, that might
make you sick. You don't look it, at any rate."

"I don't know how I look," muttered Billy Manners, stopping suddenly in
his walking, "but I know how I feel," and he made a dash for the cabin,
and was gone for some time, the others continuing their walk on deck.

In a few minutes a smiling negro in a white jacket and cap came out of the
cabin carrying a tray containing cups of beef tea, which he offered to the
boys, saying with a grin:

"Dis ain't like de beef soup yo' get at de 'cademy, sah, but mebby yo'
would like a bite or two dis mon'in' to sha'pen yo' appetite fo' dinnah?"

"No, thanks, Bucephalus," said one of the boys, Dick Percival by name, who
was walking arm in arm with Jack. "I don't need anything to sharpen my
appetite, which is always good on sea or land."

"The idea of offering a fellow anything to eat when he feels as I do,"
growled Harry. "Take it away, Buck, or I'll throw you overboard."

The high sounding name of the negro was often contracted to Buck by the
Hilltop boys, as in the present instance, but he was used to both, and
answered as readily to one as to the other, now saying with a broad grin:

"Dat am a mistake, Mistah Harry. De worser yo' feel, de mo' yo' should put
in yo' stomach, dat is to say when yo' get good nourishmental food like
dis yer. Of co'se dey is detrimental substances which----"

"That sort of talk will make me sick if nothing else will," said Harry,
hurrying away, while Jack and Dick sat down, and gazed out upon the
horizon, while sipping their bouillon and nibbling at their biscuits.

"We will be in summer seas, as the advertisements call them, before long,"
said Jack. "The air is pleasant enough as it is. Down here in the summer
it is pretty hot I take it, but in April it will be all right."

"Think of us cruising around the Spanish main where the old buccaneers
used to roam," laughed Dick. "Perhaps we will dig up a pot of gold buried
on one of the islands by some of them."

"If Captain Kidd had buried all the gold that folks said he did," replied
Jack, "he would have been kept busy till now. If