nly did he tell me, but he showed him to me."

"He showed him to you!" answered Cornhill in amazement.

[Illustration]

"He showed him to me."

"And you saw him?"

"I saw him with my own eyes."

"And who is it?"

"It's a dog."

"A dog?"

"A four-footed dog?"

"Yes."

The surprise of the sailors of the _Nautilus_ was great. Under any
other circumstances they would have burst out laughing. A dog captain
of a one hundred and seventy ton brig! It was certainly amusing
enough. But the _Forward_ was such an extraordinary ship, that one
thought twice before laughing, and before contradicting it. Besides,
Quartermaster Cornhill showed no signs of laughing.

"And Johnson showed you that new sort of captain, a dog?" he said to
the young sailor. "And you saw him?"

"As plainly as I see you, with all respect."

"Well, what do you think of that?" asked the sailors, turning to
Cornhill.

"I don't think anything," he answered curtly, "except that the
_Forward_ is a ship of the Devil, or of fools fit for Bedlam."

Without saying more, the sailors continued to gaze at the _Forward_,
which was now almost ready to depart; and there was no one of them who
presumed to say that Johnson, the boatswain, had been making fun of
the young sailor.

This story of the dog had already spread through the city, and in the
crowd of sight-seers there were many looking for the captain-dog, who
were inclined to believe that he was some supernatural animal.

Besides, for many months the _Forward_ had been attracting the public
attention; the singularity of its build, the mystery which enshrouded
it, the incognito maintained by the captain, the manner in which
Richard Shandon received the proposition of superintending its outfit,
the careful selection of the crew, its unknown destination, scarcely
conjectured by any,--all combined to give this brig a reputation of
something more than strangeness.

For a thoughtful, dreamy mind, for a philosopher, there is hardly
anything more touching than the departure of a ship; the imagination
is ready to follow her in her struggles with the waves, her contests
with the winds, in her perilous course, which does not always end in
port; and if only there is something unusual about her, the ship
appears like something fantastic, even to the least imaginative minds.

So it was with the _Forward_. And if most of the spectators were
unable to make the ingenious remarks of Quartermaster Cornhill, the