a great name for making the quickest runs between the fishing-grounds and the river.  But it wasn’t owing so much to the qualities of the smack, as to the seamanship of the skipper.  A prime sailor he was, surely.  There wasn’t another man sailed out of the River Thames who could handle a smack like Bob Goss.  When he took the tiller, somehow the craft seemed to know it, and bobbed up half a point nearer to the wind; and when we were running free with the main-sheet eased off, and the foresail shivering, her wake would be as straight as her mast; only, he was a rare fellow for carrying on, was old Captain Goss!  We would be staggering under a whole main-sail, when the other smacks had three reefs in theirs; and it was odds but we had one line of reef-points triced up, when our neighbours would be going at it under storm-trysail and storm-jib.  He worked the Lively Nan hard, he did, did Captain Goss.  Sweet, and wholesome, and easy as she was—­for she would rise to any sea, like as comfortable as a duck—­Old Goss all but drove her under.  Dry jackets were scarce on board the Lively Nan.  If there was as much wind stirring as would whirl round the rusty old vane on the topmast head, ‘Carry on, carry on!’ was always the captain’s cry; and away we would bowl, half-a-dozen of the lee-streaks of the deck under water.

Well, mates, Old Goss was a prime sailor; but he was a strange sort of man.  To see him in a passion, was something you wouldn’t forget in a hurry; and you wouldn’t have known him long without having the chance.  Most of us can swear a bit now and then; but you ought to have heard Captain Goss!  He used even to frighten the old salts, that had common oaths in their mouths from morning till night.  He was worse than the worst madman in Bedlam when his blood was up; and even the strong, bold men of the crew used to cower before him like as the cabin-boy.  And yet, mates, he was but a little, maimed man, and more than sixty years old.  He had a regular monkey-face; I never saw one like it—­brown, and all over puckers, and working and twitching, like the sea where the tide-currents meet.  He had but one eye, and he wore a big black patch over the place where the other had been; but that one eye, mates, would screw into you like a gimlet.  Well, Captain Goss was more than fifty when he came down to Barking, and bought the Lively Nan, and made a carrier[1] of her; and nobody knew who he was, or where he came from.  There was an old house at Barking then, and I have heard say that its ruins are there yet.  The boys said that Guy Fawkes—­him they burn every 5th of November—­used to live there; and the story went that it was haunted, and that there was one room, the door of which always stood ajar, and nobody could either open or shut it.  Well, mates, Old Captain Goss wasn’t the sort of man to care much about Guy Fawkeses or goblins; so he hires a room in this old house—­precious cheap he got it!—­and when he was ashore,