As I expected, the joint of beef was done to shreds, and Widow Perry rated me soundly for being so late, asking me whether I expected her dog to keep turning the jack till doomsday. (’Twas a strange custom of the Bristowe housewives to employ dogs for turning their roasting jacks).  With all humility I expressed contrition, and vowed amendment, and I kept my word.  While I ate my dinner my thoughts were busy with my late encounter with Vetch, and I wondered what he was about in Bristowe, and whether Dick Cludde was still with him.  I did not doubt they were in a desperate rage with me, and if they should be here together I was pretty sure they would take some means of avenging themselves; but confident of my strength and my skill of fence the prospect gave me rather a pleasant expectancy than any alarm.

So three days passed—­days which I spent for the most part with Woodrow the old mariner, plying him with questions innumerable about shipping and life at sea, and learning many things by my own observation.  I saw no more of Vetch, nor did anything give me cause of uneasiness.  On the second day Mistress Perry, indeed, threatened a slight discomfort by wishing me to share my room with a new lodger she had just taken; but she gave in when I flatly refused to bed with a stranger, and grumblingly accommodated the man—­a rough-looking sea dog—­in a little closet off the stairs.

On the third afternoon, when I returned to the quay after my dinner, Woodrow told me he had found a skipper who would sail for Southampton at the end of the week, and was willing to take me as ship’s boy.  He assured me that I could hope for nothing better to begin with, and the voyage would be long enough for me to try my sea legs, and, as he believed, to cure me of my fancy for a sea life.  I was to visit the skipper at the Angel tavern that evening, and if he liked my figurehead, as Woodrow put it, the matter could be settled there and then.

Accordingly, about seven o’clock, I met Woodrow at the corner of the Bridge, by the Leather Hall, and accompanied him to the Angel in Redcliffe Street, where he presented me to his friend, Captain Reddaway.  After the usual jocose allusions to my height, to which I was now fairly inured, the skipper asked me a great many questions about navigation, feigned a vast surprise at my ignorance, and supplied the answers himself, to impress me, I suppose, with his own stores of knowledge.

Then the two mariners settled down over their pipes and beer to a conversation in which I was not expected to take a part; indeed, it consisted chiefly of reminiscences of voyages they had made together, and, though entertaining enough at first, by and by became insufferably tedious.  For politeness’ sake they included me in the conversation from time to time by waving their pipes at me, and I did not like to risk hurting the feelings of my new employer by showing how wearied I was, or by leaving them; so that it was not till near ten o’clock that I managed to escape, and then only because they had both fallen asleep.