opened the bosom of the poor boy’s shirt, and untying the ribbon that fastened a small gold crucifix round his neck, she placed it in his cold hand.  The young midshipman was of a respectable family in Limerick, her native place, and a Catholic—­another strand of the cord that bound her to him.  When the captain finished reading, he bent over the departing youth, and kissed his cheek.  “Your young messmate just now desired to see you, Mr. Cringle, but it is too late, he is insensible and dying.”  Whilst he spoke, a strong shiver passed through the boy’s frame, his face became slightly convulsed, and all was over!  The captain rose, and Connolly, with a delicacy of feeling which many might not have looked for in her situation, spread one of our clean mess table-cloths over the body.  “And is it really gone you are, my poor, dear boy!” forgetting all difference of rank in the fulness of her heart.  “Who will tell this to your mother, and nobody here to wake you but ould Kate Connolly, and no time will they be giving me, nor whisky—­Ochon! ochon!”

But enough and to spare of this piping work.  The boatswain’s whistle now called me to the gangway, to superintend the handing up, from a shore boat alongside, a supply of the grand staples of the island—­ducks and onions.  The three ’Mudians in her were characteristic samples of the inhabitants.  Their faces and skins, where exposed, were not tanned, but absolutely burnt into a fiery-red colour by the sun.  They guessed and drawled like any buckskin from Virginia, superadding to their accomplishments their insular peculiarity of always shutting one eye when they spoke to you.  They are all Yankees at bottom; and if they could get their 365 Islands—­so they call the large stones on which they live—­under weigh, they would not be long in towing them into the Chesapeake.

The word had been passed to get six of the larboard guns and all the shot over to the other side, to give the brig a list of a streak or two a-starboard, so that the stage on which the carpenter and his crew were at work over the side, stopping the shot holes above the water line, might swing clear of the wash of the sea.  I had jumped from the nettings, where I was perched, to assist in unbolting one of the carronade slides, when I slipped and capsized against a peg sticking out of one of the scuppers.  I took it for something else and damned the ring-bolt incontinently.  Caboose, the cook, was passing with his mate, a Jamaica negro of the name of Johncrow, at the time.  “Don’t damn the remains of your fellow-mortals, Master Cringle; that is my leg.”  The cook of a man-of-war is no small beer, he is his Majesty’s warrant officer, a much bigger wig than a poor little mid, with whom it is condescension on his part to jest.