e to-night, the sooner we up anchor
the better, so we won't waste any more time talking."

Without waiting for a reply, Mr Jones went forward and called the crew.
The anchor was weighed, the sails were set, and the sloop Nora--bending
over before the breeze, as if doing homage in passing her friend the
Gull-Light--put to sea, and directed her course for the ancient town and
port of Yarmouth.

CHAPTER FIVE.

MORE NEW CHARACTERS INTRODUCED.

If it be true that time and tide wait for no man, it is equally true, we
rejoice to know, that authors and readers have a corresponding immunity
from shackles, and are in nowise bound to wait for time or tide.

We therefore propose to leave the Gull-stream light, and the Goodwin
sands, and the sloop Nora, far behind us, and, skipping a little in
advance of Time itself proceed at once to Yarmouth.

Here, in a snug parlour, in an easy chair, before a cheerful fire, with
a newspaper in his hand, sat a bluff little elderly gentleman, with a
bald head and a fat little countenance, in which benignity appeared to
hold perpetual though amicable rivalry with fun.

That the fat little elderly gentleman was eccentric could scarcely be
doubted, because he not only looked _over_ his spectacles instead of
through them, but also, apparently, read his newspaper upside down. A
closer inspection, however, would have shown that he was not reading the
paper at all, but looking over the top of it at an object which
accounted for much of the benignity, and some of the fun of his
expression.

At the opposite side of the table sat a very beautiful girl, stooping
over a book, and so earnestly intent thereon as to be evidently quite
oblivious of all else around her. She was at that interesting age when
romance and reality are supposed to be pretty equally balanced in a
well-regulated female mind--about seventeen. Although not classically
beautiful--her nose being slightly turned upward--she was, nevertheless,
uncommonly pretty, and, as one of her hopeless admirers expressed it,
"desperately love-able." Jet black ringlets--then in vogue--clustered
round an exceedingly fair face, on which there dwelt the hue of robust
health. Poor Bob Queeker, the hopeless admirer above referred to, would
have preferred that she had been somewhat paler and thinner, if that had
been possible; but this is not to be wondered at, because Queeker was
about sixteen years of age at that time, and wrote sonnets to the