“She flies English colors.”

A little later there was a puff of smoke from her forecastle and a ball dashed into the water athwart their bow.

“It’s a cruiser, and that means to heave to; but blow my eyes if I do it!” cried the captain, who was opposed to search and impressment.  He put the schooner about and, with all sail spread, flew over the water at a rate of speed which defied pursuit.  The cruiser fired several shots after them.

“Who is that shootin’?” Sukey asked unconcernedly, as Fernando entered the wretched cabin.

“A British man-of-war.”

“What is it shootin’ at?”

“At us.”

“I hope she will hit us and put me out o’ this misery,” groaned Sukey.

Fortunately for the chief characters of this story, the man-of-war did not hit them, and next day they reached Baltimore.  Sukey recovered his health with remarkable rapidity, and a few hours on shore made him quite himself.

Terrence, who seemed to know the town thoroughly, conducted them to an inn where they were to remain until arrangements could be made for entering the school.  Terrence took the two young men under his care in a fatherly way, assuring them it would be bad luck to any who spoke ill of them; but Terrence could not be with them for several days.  He had urgent business in Philadelphia, which would require his absence.

For a week after their arrival at Baltimore, their lives were of the most dreary monotony.  The rain, which had begun to fall soon after their arrival, continued to descend in torrents, and they found themselves close prisoners in the sanded parlors of the miserable inn.  They could but compare this wretched place with the grand old forests and broad prairies of the West, and Sukey began to sigh for home.

“Are you homesick already, Sukey?” asked Fernando.

“I am not homesick—­blast such a place as this—­give me a country where it don’t rain 365 days out o’ the year, and I’m content, home or abroad,” growled Sukey.

Their situation was by no means pleasant.  Their front window looked out upon a long, straggling, ill-paved street, with its due proportion of mud heaps and duck pools.  The houses on either side were, for the most part, dingy-looking edifices, with half-doors, and such pretensions to being shops as the display of a quart of meal, salt, or string of red peppers confers.  A more wretched, gloomy-looking picture of woe-begone poverty one seldom beheld.

It was no better if they turned for consolation to the rear of the house.  There their eyes fell upon the dirty yard of a dirty inn, and the half-covered cowshed, where two famishing animals mourned their hard fate as they chewed the cud of “sweet and bitter fancy.”  In addition, they saw an old chaise, once the yellow postchaise, the pride and glory of the establishment, now reduced from its wheels and ignominiously degraded to a hen house.  On the grass-grown roof, a cock had taken his stand, with an air of protective patronage to the feathered inhabitants beneath.