“Mr. Sennit,” I commenced, “it is necessary for us to part here.  The ship in sight is English, and will take you up.  I intend to speak her, and will take care that she knows where you are.  By standing due east you will easily cut her off, and there cannot be a doubt of her picking you up.”

“For heaven’s sake, consider a moment, Capt.  Wallingford,” Sennit exclaimed, “before you abandon us out here, a thousand miles from land.”

“You are just three hundred and twenty-six miles from Scilly, and not much more from the Land’s End, Mr. Sennit, with a wind blowing dead for both.  Then your own countrymen will pick you up, of a certainty, and carry you safe into port.”

“Ay—­into one of the West-India Islands; if an Englishman at all, yonder vessel is a running West-Indiaman; she may take us all the way to Jamaica.”

“Well, then you will have an opportunity of returning at your leisure.  You wished to take me almost as much out of my course; or, if not absolutely out of my course, quite as much out of my time.  I have as little relish for Plymouth as you seem to have for Jamaica.”

“But, the stranger may be a Frenchman—­now, I look at him, he has a French look.”

“If he should be French, he will treat you well.  It will be exchanging beef for soup-maigre for a week or two.  These Frenchmen eat and drink as well as you English.”

“But, Capt.  Wallingford, their prisons!  This fellow, Bonaparte, exchanges nobody this war, and if I get into France I am a ruined man!”

“And if I had gone into Plymouth, I fear I should have been a ruined man, too.”

“Remember, we are of the same blood, after all—­people of the same stock—­just as much countrymen as the natives of Kent and Suffolk.  Old Saxon blood, both of us.”

“Thank you, sir; I shall not deny the relationship, since it is your pleasure to claim it.  I marvel, however, you did not let your cousin’s ship pass without detaining her.”

“How could I help it, my dear Wallingford?  Lord Harry is a nobleman, and a captain, and what could a poor devil of a lieutenant, whose commission is not a year old, do against such odds!  No—­no—­there should be more feeling and good-fellowship between chaps like you and me, who have their way to make in the world.”

“You remind me of the necessity of being in motion.—­Adieu, Mr. Sennit—­cut, Moses!”

Marble struck a blow with the axe on-the studding-sail halyards, and away the Dawn glided, leaving the boat tossing on the waves, twenty fathoms further astern, on the very first send of the sea.  What Mr. Sennit said, I could not hear, now, but I very plainly saw him shake his fist at me, and his head, too; and I make no manner of doubt, if he called me anything, that he did not call me a gentleman.  In ten minutes the boat was fully a mile astern.  At first Sennit did not appear disposed to do anything, lying motionless on the water, in sullen stillness; but wiser thoughts succeeded, and, stepping his two masts, in less than twenty minutes I saw his sails spread, and the boat making the best of its way to get into the track of the stranger.