easure they can find
in getting so tipsy."

"It's merely because they are not allowed to be so, sir. That's the
whole story in few words."

"I think I could cure them, if I were permitted to try."

"I should like to hear how you'd manage that, Mr Simple."

"Why, I would oblige a man to drink off a half pint of liquor, and then
put him by himself. I would not allow him companions to make merry
with, so as to make a pleasure of intoxication. I would then wait until
next morning when he was sober, and leave him alone with a racking
headache until the evening, when I would give him another dose, and so
on, forcing him to get drunk until he hated the smell of liquor."

"Well, Mr Simple, it might do with some, but many of our chaps would
require the dose you mention to be repeated pretty often before it would
effect a cure; and what's more, they'd be very willing patients, and
make no wry faces at their physic."

"Well, that may be, but it would cure them at last. But tell me,
Swinburne, were you ever in a hurricane?"

"I've been in everything, Mr Simple, I believe, except a school, and I
never had no time to go there. Did you see that battery at Needham
Point? Well, in the hurricane of '82, them same guns were whirled away
by the wind, right over to this point here on the opposite side, the
sentries in their sentry-boxes after them. Some of the soldiers who
faced the wind had their teeth blown down their throats like broken
'baccy pipes, others had their heads turned round like dog vanes; 'cause
they waited for orders to the `_right about face_,' and the whole air
was full of young _niggers_, blowing about like peelings of _ingons_."

"You don't suppose I believe all this, Swinburne?"

"That's as may be, Mr Simple; but I've told the story so often, that
believe it myself."

"What ship were you in?"

"In the _Blanche_, Captain Faulkner, who was as fine a fellow as poor
Captain Savage, whom we buried yesterday; there could not be a finer
than either of them. I was at the taking of the _Pique_, and carried
him down below after he had received his mortal wound. We did a pretty
thing out here when we took Fort Royal by a coup-de-main, which means,
boarding from the main-yard of the frigate, and dropping from it into
the fort. But what's that under the moon?--that a sail in the offing."

Swinburne fetched the glass and directed it to the spot. "One, two,
three, four. It's the admiral, sir, and the squadro