n of soothing his vanquished spirit.

"Who'll spin it?" asked Duffy, sitting down, and preparing to add to the
fumes of the place. "Come, Stub, you tape it off; it'll be better
occupation than growlin' at the poor weather, what's never done you no
harm yet though there's no sayin' what it may do if you go on as you've
bin doin', growlin' an' aggravatin' it."

"I never spin yarns," said Stubley.

"But you tell stories sometimes, don't you?" asked Hawkson.

"No, never."

"Oh! that's a story anyhow," cried Freeman.

"Come, I'll spin ye one," said the skipper, in that hearty tone which
had an irresistible tendency to put hearers in good humour, and
sometimes even raised the growling spirit of Joe Stubley into something
like amiability.

"What sort o' yarn d'ee want, boys?" he asked, stirring the fire in the
small stove that warmed the little cabin; "shall it be comical or
sentimental?"

"Let's have a true ghost story," cried Puffy.

"No, no," said Freeman, "a hanecdote--that's what I'm fondest of--
suthin' short an' sweet, as the little boy said to the stick o'
liquorice."

"Tell us," said Stubley, "how it was you come to be saved the night the
_Saucy Jane_ went down."

"Ah! lads," said Lockley, with a look and a tone of gravity, "there's no
fun in that story. It was too terrible and only by a miracle, or
rather--as poor Fred Martin said at the time--by God's mercy, I was
saved."

"Was Fred there at the time!" asked Duffy.

"Ay, an' very near lost he was too. I thought he would never get over
it."

"Poor chap!" said Freeman; "he don't seem to be likely to git over this
arm. It's been a long time bad now."

"Oh, he'll get over that," returned Lockley; "in fact, it's a'most quite
well now, I'm told, an' he's pretty strong again--though the fever did
pull him down a bit. It's not that, it's money, that's keepin' him from
goin' afloat again."

"How's that?" asked Puffy.

"This is how it was. He got a letter which axed him to call on a lawyer
in Lun'on, who told him an old friend of his father had made a lot o'
tin out in Austeralia, an' he died, an' left some hundreds o' pounds--I
don't know how many--to his mother."

"Humph! that's just like him, the hypercrit," growled Joe Stubley; "no
sooner comes a breeze o' good luck than off he goes, too big and mighty
for his old business. He was always preachin' that money was the root
of all evil, an' now he's found it out for a fact."

"No, Fred never