“Ah!  Master Fred, you’re a chip of the old block—­neck or nothing—­carry on all sail till you tear the masts out of her!  Reef the t’gallant sails of your temper, boy, and don’t run foul of an old man who has been all but a wet-nurse to ye—­taught ye to walk, and swim, and pull an oar, and build ships, and has hauled ye out o’ the sea when ye fell in—­from the time ye could barely stump along on two legs, lookin’ like as if ye was more nor half-seas-over.”

“Well, Buzzby,” replied the boy, laughing, “if you’ve been all that to me, I think you have been a wet-nurse too!  But why do you run down my father’s ship?  Do you think I’m going to stand that?  No! not even from you, old boy.”

“Hallo! youngster,” shouted a voice from the deck of the vessel in question, “run up and tell your father we’re all ready, and if he don’t make haste he’ll lose the tide, so he will, and that’ll make us have to start on a Friday, it will, an’ that’ll not do for me, nohow it won’t; so make sail and look sharp about it, do—­won’t you?”

“What a tongue he’s got!” remarked Buzzby.  “Before I’d go to sea with a first mate who jawed like that I’d be a landsman.  Don’t ever you git to talk too much, Master Fred, wotever ye do.  My maxim is—­and it has served me through life, uncommon—­’Keep your weather-eye open and your tongue housed ‘xcept when you’ve got occasion to use it.’  If that fellow’d use his eyes more and his tongue less, he’d see your father comin’ down the road there, right before the wind, with his old sister in tow.”

“How I wish he would have let me go with him!” muttered Fred to himself sorrowfully.

“No chance now, I’m afeard,” remarked his companion.  “The gov’nor’s as stiff as a nor’-wester.  Nothin’ in the world can turn him once he’s made up his mind but a regular sou’-easter.  Now, if you had been my son, and yonder tight craft my ship, I would have said, ‘Come at once.’  But your father knows best, lad; and you’re a wise son to obey orders cheerfully, without question.  That’s another o’ my maxims, ’Obey orders, an’ ax no questions.’”

Frederick Ellice, senior, who now approached, whispering words of consolation into the ear of his weeping sister, might, perhaps, have just numbered fifty years.  He was a fine, big, bold, hearty Englishman, with a bald head, grizzled locks, a loud but not harsh voice, a rather quick temper, and a kind, earnest, enthusiastic heart.  Like Buzzby, he had spent nearly all his life at sea, and had become so thoroughly accustomed to walking on an unstable foundation that he felt quite uncomfortable on solid ground, and never remained more than a few months at a time on shore.  He was a man of good education and gentlemanly manners, and had worked his way up in the merchant service step by step until he obtained the command of a West India trader.

A few years previous to the period in which our tale opens, an event occurred which altered the course of Captain Ellice’s life, and for a long period plunged him into the deepest affliction.  This was the loss of his wife at sea under peculiarly distressing circumstances.