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"But that's shure the ould man's secret, Billy," pleaded Harry. "It's not a foine chap as ye are would be wheedlin' it out av me, now?", 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., "Why, sir," answered the Captain, "it is true that we was chased, but that didn't make us the voyage the young lady's obliging enough to praise us for. Off the Scillies a French frigate hove in sight on the weather bow, but what could she do with us? I eased off and got her abeam, soon afterwards on the quarter; I then luffed, sir, making a tight jam of it, and crossed her bows at the distance of about three mile. She threw a few shot at us, but what's a frigate a-going to do with a[Pg 93] vessel as can look up as the Aurora does, until by thunder the wind seems blowing fore-and-aft?".