‘Well, young gentleman!’ he accosted me, and he hoped I had slept well.  My courteous request to him to bid the tug stand by to take us on board, only caused him to wear a look of awful gravity.  ’You’re such a deuce of a sleeper,’ he said.  ’You see, we had to be off early to make up for forty hours lost by that there fog.  I tried to wake you both; no good; so I let you snore away.  We took up our captain mid-way down the river, and now you’re in his hands, and he’ll do what he likes with you, and that ’s a fact, and my opinion is you ’ll see a foreign shore before you’re in the arms of your family again.’

At these words I had the horrible sensation of being caged, and worse, transported into the bargain.

I insisted on seeing the captain.  A big bright round moon was dancing over the vessel’s bowsprit, and this, together with the tug thumping into the distance, and the land receding, gave me—­coming on my wrath—­suffocating emotions.

No difficulties were presented in my way.  I was led up to a broad man in a pilot-coat, who stood square, and looked by the bend of his eyebrows as if he were always making head against a gale.  He nodded to my respectful salute.  ‘Cabin,’ he said, and turned his back to me.

I addressed him, ’Excuse me, I want to go on shore, captain.  I must and will go!  I am here by some accident; you have accidentally overlooked me here.  I wish to treat you like a gentleman, but I won’t be detained.’

Joe spoke a word to the captain, who kept his back as broad to me as a school-slate for geography and Euclid’s propositions.

‘Cabin, cabin,’ the captain repeated.

I tried to get round him to dash a furious sentence or so in his face, since there was no producing any impression on his back; but he occupied the whole of a way blocked with wire-coil, and rope, and boxes, and it would have been ridiculous to climb this barricade when by another right-about-face he could in a minute leave me volleying at the blank space between his shoulders.

Joe touched my arm, which, in as friendly a way as I could assume, I bade him not do a second time; for I could ill contain myself as it was, and beginning to think I had been duped and tricked, I was ready for hostilities.  I could hardly bear meeting Temple on my passage to the cabin.  ‘Captain Jasper Welsh,’ he was reiterating, as if sounding it to discover whether it had an ominous ring:  it was the captain’s name, that he had learnt from one of the seamen.

Irritated by his repetition of it, I said, I know not why, or how the words came:  ’A highwayman notorious for his depredations in the vicinity of the city of Bristol.’

This set Temple off laughing:  ’And so he bought a ship and had traps laid down to catch young fellows for ransom.’