the course pursued by the Bonnyclabber and toward the spot at which the Nupple-duck had been swallowed up—­I saw a quantity of what appeared to be wreckage.  It turned out to be some of the stuff that we had thrown overboard under a misapprehension.  The several articles had been compiled and, so to speak, carefully edited.  They were, in fact, lashed together, forming a raft.  On a stool in the center of it—­not, apparently navigating it, but rather with the subdued and dignified bearing of a passenger, sat Captain Abersouth, of the Nupple-duck, reading a novel.

Our meeting was not cordial.  He remembered me as a man of literary taste superior to his own and harbored resentment, and although he made no opposition to my taking passage with him I could see that his acquiescence was due rather to his muscular inferiority than to the circumstance that I was damp and taking cold.  Merely acknowledging his presence with a nod as I climbed abroad, I seated myself and inquired if he would care to hear the concluding stanzas of “Naseby Fight.”

“No,” he replied, looking up from his novel, “no, Claude Reginald Gump, writer of sea stories, I’ve done with you.  When you sank the Nupple-duck some days ago you probably thought that you had made an end of me.  That was clever of you, but I came to the surface and followed the other ship—­the one on which you escaped.  It was I that the sailor saw from the masthead.  I saw him see me.  It was for me that all that stuff was hove overboard.  Good—­I made it into this raft.  It was, I think, the next day that I passed the floating body of a man whom I recognized as, my old friend Billy Troutbeck—­he used to be a cook on a man-o’-war.  It gives me pleasure to be the means of saving your life, but I eschew you.  The moment that we reach port our paths part.  You remember that in the very first sentence of this story you began to drive my ship, the Nupple-duck, on to a reef of coral.”

I was compelled to confess that this was true, and he continued his inhospitable reproaches: 

“Before you had written half a column you sent her to the bottom, with me and the crew.  But you—­you escaped.”

“That is true,” I replied; “I cannot deny that the facts are correctly stated.”

“And in a story before that, you took me and my mates of the ship Camel into the heart of the South Polar Sea and left us frozen dead in the ice, like flies in amber.  But you did not leave yourself there—­you escaped.”

“Really, Captain,” I said, “your memory is singularly accurate, considering the many hardships that you have had to undergo; many a man would have gone mad.”

“And a long time before that,” Captain Abersouth resumed, after a pause, more, apparently, to con his memory than to enjoy my good opinion of it, “you lost me at sea—­look here; I didn’t read anything but George Eliot at that time, but I’m told that you lost me at sea in the Mudlark.  Have I been misinformed?”