g on the poop, began to talk
with ever-deepening interest of home, while the children played beside
them, or asked innumerable questions about brothers, sisters, and
cousins, whose names were as familiar as household words, though their
voices and forms were still unknown.

The weather was fine, the sky was clear; warm summer breezes filled the
sails, and all nature seemed to have sunk into a condition so peaceful
as to suggest the idea that storms were past and gone for ever, when the
homeward-bound ship neared the land. One evening the captain remarked
to the passengers, that if the wind would hold as it was a little
longer, they should soon pass through the Downs, and say good-bye to the
sea breezes and the roll of the ocean wave.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

BOB QUEEKER COMES OUT VERY STRONG INDEED.

It is both curious and interesting to observe the multitude of unlikely
ways in which the ends of justice are ofttimes temporarily defeated.
Who would have imagined that an old pump would be the cause of extending
Morley Jones's term of villainy, of disarranging the deep-laid plans of
Mr Larks, of effecting the deliverance of Billy Towler, and of at once
agonising the body and ecstatifying the soul of Robert Queeker? Yet so
it was. If the old pump had not existed--if its fabricator had never
been born--there is every probability that Mr Jones's career would have
been cut short at an earlier period. That he would, in his then state
of mind, have implicated Billy, who would have been transported along
with him and almost certainly ruined; that Mr Queeker would--but hold.
Let us present the matter in order.

Messrs. Merryheart and Dashope were men of the law, and Mr Robert
Queeker was a man of their office--in other words, a clerk--not a
"confidential" one, but a clerk, nevertheless, in whose simple-minded
integrity they had much confidence. Bob, as his fellow-clerks styled
him, was sent on a secret mission to Ramsgate. The reader will observe
how fortunate it was that his mission was _secret_, because it frees us
from the necessity of setting down here an elaborate and tedious
explanation as to how, when, and where the various threads of his
mission became interwoven with the fabric of our tale. Suffice it to
say that the only part of his mission with which we are acquainted is
that which had reference to two men--one of whom was named Mr Larks,
the other Morley Jones.

Now, it so happened that Queeker's acquaint