“Accomplisht eke to flute it and to sing,
      Euphonious Bawcock bids the welkin ring.”

“If,” said Mr. Badcock, in an injured tone and with a dark glance aft at Captain Pomery, “if a man don’t like my playing, he has only to say so.  I don’t press it on any one.  From all I ever heard, art is a matter of taste.  But I don’t understand a man’s being suddenly upset by a tune that, only yesterday, he couldn’t hear often enough.”

Out of the little logic I had picked up at Oxford I tried to explain to him the process known as sorites; and suggested that Captain Pomery, while tolerant of “I attempt from Love’s sickness to fly” up to the hundredth repetition, might conceivably show signs of tiring at the hundred-and-first.  Yet in my heart I mistrusted my own argument, and my wonder at the skipper’s conduct increased when, the next dawn finding us still becalmed, but with the added annoyance of a fog that almost hid the bowsprit’s end, his demeanour swung back to joviality.  I taxed him with this, in my father’s hearing.

“I make less account of fogs than most men,” he answered.  “I can smell land; which is a gift and born with me.  But this is no weather to be caught in anywhere near the Sallee coast; and if we’re to lose the wind, let’s have a good fog to hide us, I say.”

He went on to assure us that the seas hereabouts were infested with Moorish pirates, and to draw some dismal pictures of what might happen if we fell in with a prowling Sallateen.

With all his fears he kept his reckoning admirably, and we half-sailed, half-drifted through the Strait, and so near to the Rock of Gibraltar that, passing within range of it at the hour of reveilly, we heard the British bugles sounding to us like ghosts through the fog.  Captain Pomery here was in two minds about laying-to and waiting for a breeze; but a light slant of wind encouraged him to carry the Gauntlet through.  It bore us between the invisible strait, and for a score of sea-miles beyond; then, as casually as it had helped, it deserted us.

Day broke and discovered us with the Moorish coast low on our starboard horizon.  To Mr. Fett and Mr. Badcock this meant nothing, and my father might have left them to their ignorance had he not in the course of the forenoon caught them engaged upon a silly piece of mischief, which was, to scribble on small sheets of paper various affecting narratives—­as that the Gauntlet was sinking, or desperately attacked by pirates, in such and such a latitude and longitude—­insert them in empty bottles, and commit them to the chances of the deep.  The object (as Mr. Fett explained it) being to throw Billy Priske’s sweetheart off the scent.  For two days past he had been slyly working upon Billy’s fears, and was relating to him how, with two words, a Moorish lady had followed Gilbert a Becket from Palestine to London, and found him there—­when my father, attracted by the smell of pitch, strolled forward and caught Mr. Badcock in the act of sealing the bottles from a ladle which stood heating over a lamp.  In the next five minutes the pair learnt that my father could lose his temper, and the lesson visibly scared them.