“I will write, dearest, since you wish it—­and now, good-bye.”

Vanslyperken took the widow round the waist, and after a little murmuring and reluctance, was permitted to snatch a kiss.  Her eyes followed him mournfully till he shut the door and disappeared, and then Nancy Corbett gave way to unbounded mirth.

“So the fool has bit already,” thought she; “now if he only writes to me, and I get his acknowledgment of having delivered the letter, the beast is in my power, and I can hang him any day I please.  Upon his honour, he did not know a single woman there:—­Lord have mercy!—­what liars men are—­but we can sometimes beat them with their own weapons.”  And Nancy’s thoughts reverted to her former life, which she now dwelt upon with pain and sorrow.

Mr Vanslyperken returned on board; the anchor was weighed immediately that the boats had been hoisted up, and the Yungfrau ran out with a fair wind, which lasted until the evening, when it fell almost calm, and the cutter made but little way through the water.  Many of the men were conversing on the forecastle as usual, and the subject of their discourse was the surmising what had become of Corporal Van Spitter.  In one point they all appeared to agree, which was, that they hoped he would never return to the cutter.

“If he does I owe him one,” observed Jemmy Ducks.  “It’s all through him that my wife was turned out of the vessel.”

“And a little bit from her tongue, Jemmy,” observed Coble.

“Why, perhaps so,” replied Jemmy; “but what was it set her tongue loose but the threat of him to flog me, and what made him threaten that but the ’peaching of that fat marine?”

“Very good arguments, Jemmy.  Well, I will say that for your wife, Jemmy, she does love you, and there’s no sham about it.”

“Never mind Jemmy’s wife, let’s have Jemmy’s song,” said Spurey; “he hasn’t piped since he was pulled up by the corporal.”

“No:  he put my pipe out, the hippopotamus.  Well, I’ll give it you—­it shall be about what we are talking of, Obadiah.”  Jemmy perched himself on the fore-end of the booms, and sang as follows: 

“I suppose that you think ’cause my trousers are tarry,
And because that I ties my long hair in a tail,
While landsmen are figged out as fine as Lord Harry,
With breast-pins and cravats as white as old sail;
That I’m a strange creature, a know-nothing ninny,
But fit for the planks for to walk in foul weather;
That I ha’n’t e’er a notion of the worth of a guinea,
And that you, Poll, can twist me about as a feather,—­
Lord love you!!

“I know that this life is but short at the best on’t,
That Time it flies fast, and that work must be done;
That when danger comes ’tis as well for to jest on’t,
’Twill be but the lighter felt when it do come: 
If you think, then, from this that I an’t got a notion
Of a heaven above, with its mercy in store,
And the devil below, for us lads of the ocean,
Just the same as it be for the landsmen on shore,—­
Lord love you!!