The Guardian-Mother returned to New York after this successful voyage, though not till Captain Ringgold had obtained a strong hint that Scoble had a wife in England.  The educational scheme of the commander was then fully considered, and it was decided to make a voyage around the world in the Guardian-Mother.  She was duly prepared for the purpose by Captain Ringgold.  A ship’s company of the highest grade was obtained.  The last to be shipped was W. Penn Sharp as a quartermaster, the only vacancy on board.  He had been a skilful detective most of his life, and failing health alone compelled him to go to sea; and he had been a sailor in his early years, attaining the position of first officer of a large Indiaman.

The captain made him third officer at Bermuda, the better to have his services as a detective.  He had investigated Scoble’s record, and eventually found Mrs. Scoble in Cuba, where she had inherited the large fortune of an uncle whom she had nursed in his last sickness.  Scoble had come into the possession of the wealth of a brother who had recently died in Bermuda.  He had purchased a steam-yacht of four hundred tons, in which he had followed the Guardian-Mother, and had several times attempted to sink her in collisions.

Officers came to Cuba to arrest him for his crimes at the races, and he was sent to the scene of his villany, where the court sentenced him to Sing Sing for a long term.  The court in Cuba decreed that his yacht belonged to his wife; and her new owner, at the suggestion of the commander of the Guardian-Mother, made Penn Sharp, to whom she was largely indebted for the fortune to which she had succeeded, the captain of her.  The steam-yacht was the Viking, and Mrs. Scoble sailed in her to New York, and then to England, where she obtained a divorce from her recreant husband, and became the wife of Captain Sharp, who was now in command of the Blanche, the white steamer that sailed abreast of the Guardian-Mother when the wreck in the Arabian Sea was discovered.

From a sailing-yacht sunk in a squall in the harbor of New York, the crew of the steamer had saved two gentlemen.  One was a celebrated physician and surgeon, suffering from overwork, Dr. Philip Hawkes.  He was induced to accept the commander’s offer of a passage around the world for his services as the surgeon of the ship.  His companion was a learned Frenchman, afflicted in the same manner as his friend; and he became the instructor on board.

Squire Scarburn, Louis’s trustee, who was always called “Uncle Moses,” was a passenger.  Mrs. Belgrave had taken with her Mrs. Sarah Blossom, as a companion.  She had been Uncle Moses’s housekeeper.  She was a good-looking woman of thirty-six, and one of the “salt of the earth,” though her education, except on Scripture subjects, had been greatly neglected.  Felix McGavonty, the Milesian crony of Louis, had been brought up by the trustee, and had lived in his family.  The good lady wanted to be regarded as the mother of Felix, and the young man did not fully fall in with the idea.