Scarcely had the Aurora's skipper made this answer when there appeared at the side of the lieutenant a figure whose apparition was so sudden that, like Hamlet's ghost in[Pg 399] the theatre, he might be thought to have risen from below through an opening in the deck. He wore a cocked hat athwartships. His frock uniform coat seemed somewhat threadbare; amidst the folds of the left breast of his coat were four weather-tarnished and lustreless stars. The right sleeve was empty and was secured to the breast. One eye was protected by a green shade. He looked a little man alongside the lieutenant who himself was not above the average. Collingwood described him as small enough to be drawn through an alderman's thumb ring.,
His companion, a slight, stooped man, the sallowness of whose face was accentuated by a short black moustache, who had remained almost silent from the time he had entered the house, looked up at these words and smiled. "We owe that boy and this gentleman our lives," he said briefly.,
The decks had been washed down, the ropes coiled away, and everything was neat, sparkling with the swabbed brine from pump or bucket, and the whole a pleasant picture to the eye with its lofty fabric of wide white canvas, its glossy black sides descending into a ruddy coat of copper sheathing which charged the water immediately under with a yellow light as of fire, the canvas forward lifting and drooping in wings of triangular cloth like the pinions of a sea bird that gently flutters its plumes as it slowly breasts the water to the impulse of its webbed feet. Smoke from the chimney of the little galley rose for a space in a straight line, then curved like the liquid column of a fountain. The cook was preparing breakfast for the cabin, and the savoury smell of eggs and bacon in the process of cooking made the scarcely breeze-disturbed atmosphere in the neighbourhood of the schooner's kitchen shore-like and home-like, and in every sense delicious to hungry sailors whose breakfast was[Pg 341] black tea, ship's biscuit, and such remains of yesterday's beef as they might have preserved..
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