owed, 'there
is his head upon the crest of a wave. Easy, or we shall be over him! Two
more strokes and be ready to seize him! Keep up, friend! There's help at
hand!'

'Take help to those who need help' said a voice out of the sea. 'Zounds,
man, keep a guard on your oar! I fear a pat from it very much more than
I do the water.'

These words were delivered in so calm and self-possessed a tone that all
concern for the swimmer was set at rest. Drawing in our oars we faced
round to have a look at him. The drift of the boat had brought us so
close that he could have grasped the gunwale had he been so minded.

'Sapperment!' he cried in a peevish voice; 'to think of my brother Nonus
serving me such a trick! What would our blessed mother have said could
she have seen it? My whole kit gone, to say nothing of my venture in
the voyage! And now I have kicked off a pair of new jack boots that
cost sixteen rix-dollars at Vanseddar's at Amsterdam. I can't swim in
jack-boots, nor can I walk without them.'

'Won't you come in out of the wet, sir?' asked Reuben, who could scarce
keep serious at the stranger's appearance and address. A pair of long
arms shot out of the water, and in a moment, with a lithe, snake-like
motion, the man wound himself into the boat and coiled his great length
upon the stern-sheets. Very lanky he was and very thin, with a craggy
hard face, clean-shaven and sunburned, with a thousand little wrinkles
intersecting it in every direction. He had lost his hat, and his short
wiry hair, slightly flecked with grey, stood up in a bristle all over
his head. It was hard to guess at his age, but he could scarce have been
under his fiftieth year, though the ease with which he had boarded our
boat proved that his strength and energy were unimpaired. Of all his
characteristics, however, nothing attracted my attention so much as his
eyes, which were almost covered by their drooping lids, and yet looked
out through the thin slits which remained with marvellous brightness and
keenness. A passing glance might give the idea that he was languid and
half asleep, but a closer one would reveal those glittering, shifting
lines of light, and warn the prudent man not to trust too much to his
first impressions.

'I could swim to Portsmouth,' he remarked, rummaging in the pockets of
his sodden jacket; 'I could swim well-nigh anywhere. I once swam from
Gran on the Danube to Buda, while a hundred thousand Janissaries
danced with rage on