n,--"frightened half to death;
that's sure enough, and no mistake; and so would you have been, my lad,
if you had been in my place. But I don't think I'll tell you anything
more about my miserable life on board that ship. Hadn't we better skip
that?"

"O no, no!" cried the children all together, "don't skip anything."

"Well, then," said the obliging Captain, glad enough to see how much his
young friends were interested, "if you _will_ know what sort of a
miserable time young sailors have of it, I'll tell you; and let me tell
you, too, there's many a one of them has just as bad a time as I had.

"In the first place, you see, they gave me such wretched food to eat,
all out of a rusty old tin plate, and I was all the time so sick from
the motion of the vessel as we went tossing up and down on the rough
sea, and from the tobacco-smoke of the forecastle, and all the other bad
smells, that I could hardly eat a mouthful, so that I was half ready to
die of starvation; and, as if this was not misery enough, the sailors
were all the time, when in the forecastle, quarrelling like so many wild
beasts in a cage; and as two of them had pistols, and all of them had
knives, I was every minute in dread lest they should take it into their
heads to murder each other, and kill me by mistake. So, I can tell you,
being a young sailor-boy isn't what it's cracked up to be."

"O, wasn't it dreadful!" said Alice, "to be sick all the time, and
nobody there to take care of you."

"Well, I wasn't so sick, maybe, after all," answered the Captain,
smiling,--"only _sea-sick_, you know; and then, for the credit of the
ship, I'll say that, if you had nice plum-pudding every day for dinner,
you would think it horrid stuff if you were sea-sick."

"But don't people die when they are sea-sick?" inquired Alice.

"Not often, child," answered the Captain, playfully; "but they feel all
the time as if they were going to, and when they don't feel that way,
they feel as if they'd like to.

"However, I was miserable enough in more ways than one; for to these
troubles was added a great distress of mind, caused by the sport the
sailors made of me, and also by remorse of conscience for having run
away from home, and thus got myself into this great scrape. Then, to
make the matter worse,--as if it was not bad enough already,--a violent
storm set upon us in the dark night. You could never imagine how the
ship rolled about over the waves. Sometimes they swept cl