er cleats as if he were ascending a comfortable staircase,
only pausing an instant on the edge of the gunwale of the bulwarks
before jumping down on the deck, was a tall spare man with a thin face
and high cheekbones, a long pointed nose being also a most prominent
feature. He had very scanty whiskers, too, and this seemed to make his
face look thinner and his nose longer, so that the latter resembled a
bird's beak.

This was Captain Gillespie, as I quickly learnt from the way Mr
Saunders and Matthews addressed him; Mr Mackay, meanwhile, giving him a
cordial salutation from the head of the poop, his proper place as the
officer in command, until his superior took the reins in his own hand,
which as yet the captain did not offer to do.

"I hardly expected you so soon, sir," said Mr Mackay, leaning over the
rail. "We brought up earlier than I thought we should, the tide
fetching us down in capital time."

"Aye, but I was on the look-out for ye, Mackay, for I told you I'd be
aboard almost as you anchored; and, you know, when I say a thing I mean
a thing."

"Hear that now?" said Tim the boatswain to me in a loud whisper, he
having come down from the forecastle after heaving a rope over to those
in the boat, and I following him to where the others were standing on
the deck. "Ye'll soon know owld Jock's ways. We allers calls him
`Sayin's an' Maynins'; for that's what he's allars a-sayin'!"

While the captain was exchanging greetings with the mates and Matthews,
my other two fellow apprentices being nowhere to be seen, another thin
man followed him up the side-ladder from the boat, who, wearing a thick
monkey-jacket, looked a trifle less lean than Captain Gillespie; and to
him succeeded a shoal of sailors, nineteen clambering in on board after
him.

Tim Rooney did not notice these much, only telling me that the one who
came immediately in the captain's wake was the "say," or channel pilot,
who would con the ship for the remainder of her course down the river
and to the Downs beyond; and I may add that this individual was the only
thin pilot I have ever seen!

Rooney also said that the batch of men brought to complete our crew
seemed "a tidy lot;" but when the last man stepped down from the
bulwarks, he seemed a little more impressed, not to say excited.

"Bedad," he exclaimed sotto voce to me, "I'm blissid if the skipper
ar'n't picked up that Chinee cook we'd aboard two v'y'ges agone, owld
Ching Wang! There's his