Chapter Seven.

Chapter Seven.A South-Easterly Gale.“Oh, Nell!” cried Bob to his sister the same evening, some time after dinner, which, through their explorations on the beach, was somewhat later than usual—“I do wonder what that mysterious ‘something’ is the Captain keeps promising us for ‘to-morrow.’ Can he be thinking of taking us for a trip on the sea in his yacht, or what?”“I wonder,” was all Nellie could say in reply to her brother’s remark, echoing, so to speak, his own words—“I do wonder—what he is going to do, Bob?”Their anxious curiosity, however, availed them naught; the old sailor keeping provokingly silent and being as mute as the Sphinx on the subject, in spite of their wistful looks and watchfulness.Throughout the evening the Captain only opened his lips to say to Mrs Gilmour, with whom he was playing one of those post-prandial games of cribbage which it had been his wont to indulge in before the advent of Bob and Nellie on the scene to interrupt their regular routine, “Fifteen four and two for his heels,” or “I’ll take three for a flush, ma’am,” as the case might be. He only made use of such-like technical phraseology common to cribbage players, limiting his conversation to the game alone; without leaving a loophole for either of the impatient listeners in the comer, who were turning over picture-books and otherwise diverting themselves, equally silently, till bedtime, to get in a word edgeways.It was positively exasperating to Bob; especially as, the moment the old sailor chanced to notice one or other of the children eyeing him more attentively than usual on his looking up from the cards before him, he would smile knowingly and nod his head in the most waggish fashion.“I don’t think he means anything in particular at all,” said the restless Master Bob a little later on to Nellie again. “See how funny he looks! He’s only ‘taking a rise’ out of us, as he calls it.”“No, Bob,” said Nellie, catching another quizzical look from the Captain just at that moment, “I don’t think that. I’m sure he means something from that way he winked at us. Besides, Bob, he promised, and you know that Captain Dresser never breaks his word!”Presently the report of the nine o’clock gun rolled through the night air, its echoes reverberating fainter and fainter until lost in the distance to seaward.“By Jove!” exclaimed the Captain, throwing his cards on the table and rising from his seat,—“It’s time for me to say good-night, or I shan’t get any beauty sleep!”“It’s not so very late,” said Mrs Gilmour, rising and going towards the open window looking over the Common. “What a lovely night it is!”“Aye,” replied the old sailor, following her, “the sky is bright and clear enough, certainly.”“Yes, what myriads of stars are out! I can see the ‘milky way’ quite plain, can’t you, children?”“Where, auntie?” asked Nellie behind her, while Bob stepped out on to the balcony the better to see. “I don’t see it.”Mrs Gilmour showed them the forked pathway leading up from the south and east to the zenith, looking as if powdered with the dust of stars which ‘Charles’s wain,’ as country people term the constellation, had crushed in its lumbering progress through the heavens.Away beyond this golden ‘wake’ of starlets the more majestic planets shone in stately grandeur; while the evening star twinkled in the immensity of space, still further away to the westwards.“But the more you look at them, the further away they appear to go,” put in Nellie. “Though, strangely enough, they don’t seem to get any smaller.”“Aye, aye,” acquiesced the Captain. “Itisawful to think of the millions of miles they are separated from our globe, and that yet their light reaches us! Why, it is wonderful for us to reflect on this!”“Hark! I hear a church bell ringing,” cried Bob suddenly at this point. “It sounds as if it came from the sea out yonder.”“So it does, my boy,” answered the Captain; “but not from any church. It is the bell on the Spit buoy that you hear ringing away to the southward. It is a bad sign for to-morrow, denoting as it does a change of wind to a rainy quarter?”“Oh dear!” exclaimed Bob, in such lugubrious tones that even Nellie laughed, although sharing his feelings about the prospect of a wet day, with the more than probable contingency of their being confined to the house. “What shall we do?”“Cheer up, my lad, it may not be so bad after all,” cried the Captain heartily. “But, really, I must be going now; for, it is close on ten o’clock and I shall lose all my beauty sleep, as I said before. Where is young Dick?”“Down in the kitchen with Sarah,” replied Mrs Gilmour to this question, ringing the bell as she spoke. “He’ll soon be ready if you insist on taking him away with you.”“Humph!” ejaculated the other, “as he’s going to be my valet or factotum by the agreement we made to-day, I don’t think we’ll be able to tell whether we suit each other, ha-ha! if he remains in one house and I in another, eh?”“Perhaps not,” said Mrs Gilmour, smiling in response with the chuckle he indulged in at the recollection of his old joke on his way home from the dockyard; and Dick entering the room at the same moment, with a broad grin on his face as if he knew what they were talking about, she added—“Sure, here he is to spake for himself! Are you ready to go home with the Captain, Dick?”“Yes, mum,” answered the lad promptly. “Sarah told me as how the good gentleman allers went away sharp at nine o’clock, and so I comes up as the bell rung.”“That’s right, sharp’s the word and quick’s the motion; so we’d better be off,” said the old sailor, taking his hat and stick which the housemaid, Sarah aforesaid, brought in from the hall. “Good-night, ma’am,—good-night, chickabiddies!”“Good-night!” replied Mrs Gilmour, Nellie echoing her aunt’s adieu with a parting injunction of her own. “Pray be sure and bring back Dick to-morrow morning, Captain!”“Perhaps, too, you’ll tell us then what you are going to do if we are good?” said Bob entreatingly, “though you would not to-night.”“We’ll see how the cat jumps!” replied the Captain with his cheery chuckling laugh as he marched out of the hall and down the steps with Dick after him; their retreating footsteps gradually dying away until they rounded the corner of the parade, the last sound heard being that of the ferrule of the Captain’s malacca cane as it rang on the pavement, keeping time to the rhythm of his tread, and his voice repeating in the distance his quizzing rejoinder, “we’ll see how the cat jumps!”The ‘cat’ evidently did not ‘jump’ properly the next day, or, if it jumped at all, it executed that movement most decidedly in the wrong direction; for, when morning broke, much to Bob and Miss Nell’s disgust, they found that a stormy south-easterly gale had set in, accompanied by smart showers of rain, which very unpleasant change in the aspect of the weather put all ideas of their going out entirely out of the question.During the night, the wind, which had veered more to the eastwardly, rose considerably, drowning the clanging knell of the Spit buoy bell and rattling the windows and doors, like some desperate burglar on thoughts of plunder bent trying to effect a forcible entry.Not satisfied with this alone, ‘Rude Boreas’ sent one of his imps down the chimney to frighten poor Nellie, who lay trembling in bed, by flapping up and down the register of the grate; while another would every now and then boldly rush up and grip hold of the house, shaking it viciously and causing it to rock from roof to basement—the rebuffed rascal then sailing away with a shriek of disappointed spite and rage, moaning and groaning like a creature in pain as it went off to vent its malice elsewhere!Ere long the sea, unable to keep its temper under the bad treatment it received from the wind, which blew in its face most insultingly and kept continually ‘pitting and patting it,’ baker-man fashion, in a very aggravating way, began to boil up in anger, lashing itself into a passion and roaring with fury; while the noise Neptune made by and by deadened the roar of his assailant as he flung himself aloft in his struggles to grapple his nimble foe, and, missing his aim, rolled onward his boiling waves until they broke on the beach with the shock of an earthquake, amid a hurricane of foam!The awesome sound of wave and sea combined kept Bob awake nearly all night, the same as it did poor Nellie; the noise being so strange to their London ears, although, in some respects, somewhat similar to that of the street traffic of the metropolis.Not only did it keep him awake, but the battle of the elements made Master Bob get up much earlier than usual; for he came down to the drawing-room before Sarah had time to finish dusting the furniture.Here he was soon afterwards joined by Nellie, who was equally ‘spry’ in her movements; and the pair amused themselves till breakfast was ready in looking out of the windows at the busy scene which the offing presented, so different to that of the previous evening, when all was quiet and calm, with Neptune gone to sleep and Boreas speaking but in a whisper!The whilom glassy surface of the deep was now, however, a mass of short choppy waves, the sea king’s ‘white horses’ leaping up friskily in every direction and chasing each other as they rolled in landward, throwing aloft clouds of feathery spray in their sport, as if champing it from their bits. Such was the scene far as the eye could span away to the eastward, where the sky was lit up by a stray gleam or two from the long-since risen sun, who, though trying to hide himself behind a bank of blue-black clouds, was not quite able to conceal his whereabouts.Out at sea opposite, facing south and almost on the horizon line, a lot of vessels could be seen scudding down Channel, under short canvas but outward bound, just coming in sight beyond Saint Helen’s to make sure of their landfall and then disappearing the next moment behind the Isle of Wight, which shut them out from view; while, to the left, snugly sheltered under the lee of the Ryde hills, several others had run in and anchored off the Motherbank, waiting for a change of wind before proceeding on their voyage up, along the coast, to the river—‘the river’ of the world, the Thames!As Bob and Nellie gazed out, taking in all these varied details of the scene by degrees, they could not help being pleased, everything was so novel; but, they saw something else beyond the prospect which cast ‘a damper’ over their spirits, theoretically as well as practically.This was the rain, which came in squalls, the smart showers hurtling down in pattering intensity, momentarily shutting out the sea and its surroundings from sight; while the swollen raindrops dashed against the window-panes like hail, trying, like the whirling storm-blast, to force a passage into every nook and cranny that lay open to attack.“Oh dear!” sighed Bob dismally, his nose pressed like a piece of putty against the glass. “It’s awful rain, Nell; I don’t think it will ever stop!”“Oh dear!” sighed Nellie, in responsive echo; but, just then their aunt bustled into the room, her face the picture of good-humour, in marked contrast to theirs, and she caught the mournful exclamation—“Oh dear!”“Why, what’s the matter?” asked Mrs Gilmour, in a cheerful tone, on their turning round as she entered. “To look at you both, one would think that something dreadful had happened!”“It’s raining,” said Bob, in a melancholy tone. “It’s raining, auntie!”“So I can see,” retorted Mrs Gilmour. “Haven’t I got eyes of my own, sure, me dear?”“But we shan’t be able to go out, auntie,” cried Nellie, in the most broken-hearted way. “We shan’t be able to go out!”“You need not be so disconsolate about that, dearie,” said the other smiling. “It may not rain all day; and, if so, you’ll be able to get out between the breaks when it holds up. But, there’s Sarah ringing the bell, so, children, let us go downstairs now to the parlour; perhaps by the time we have finished breakfast it will have cleared up and be quite fine.”These cheery words, combined possibly with a savoury odour of frizzled bacon and hot coffee that came up appetisingly from below, had the effect, for a while at least, of banishing Bob and Nellie’s gloom, and without further ado they accompanied their aunt to the breakfast-room downstairs.Here, stretched on the hearthrug before the grate, in which a bright cosy little fire was blazing and looking uncommonly cheery, although it was now summer, lay Rover.Without rising, he lazily greeted them by flopping his heavy tail, albeit he lifted his nose in the air and sniffed, as if in anticipation of sharing the coming meal with the welcome guests who so opportunely appeared.“Well, I declare!” cried Mrs Gilmour, “I hope you make yourself at home, sir?”Rover only flopped his tail the more furiously at this, his appealing brown eyes saying, as plainly as dog could speak, that he was hungry, and that if she meant to be kind he would prefer actions to words.After breakfast, as the rain still continued, Bob got grumpy again and Nellie mopey from not being able to go out on the beach as both longed to do.In this emergency, their aunt suggested that the unhappy children should occupy themselves in sorting and arranging in an old album, which she gave them, some of the best bits of seaweed they had collected the previous afternoon, the good lady advising them first to soak the specimens in a bowl of fresh-water, so as to get rid of the salt and sand and other impurities, besides enabling the specimens to be laid flatter in the book for subsequent pressing.By this means, the time passed so pleasantly that Master Bob and Miss Nell were much surprised when Mrs Gilmour, who had meanwhile been busying herself about household matters, came to tell them, anon, that they must clear their things off the parlour-table on account of Sarah wanting to lay luncheon.“Why, auntie,” cried Bob, looking up from the basin in which he was busy washing the last lot of seaweed, “we’ve hardly begun yet!”“You’ve been a long time beginning then, sir,” replied Mrs Gilmour. “Do you know that it is past one o’clock; so that you’ve been more than three hours at your task? See, too, my dears, the rain has cleared off, and it looks as if it were going to be fine for a bit.”“How nice, aunt Polly!” said Nellie, the neat-handed, carefully lifting up the album out of Sarah’s way so that she might spread the cloth. “I declare I never thought once of looking out of the window to see if it were still wet. Did you, Bob?”“No,” he answered, “I was too busy helping you, Nell.”“Ah, my dearies,” interposed Mrs Gilmour, taking advantage of the opportunity to point a moral, “you see what it is not to be idle and having something to do! If you had not both been so engrossed with your task, you, Master Bob, would have been ‘Oh-ing’ all over the house and going to each window in turn to see if the rain had stopped, looking like a bear with a sore head; while you, Miss Nell, would probably have shed as many tears as would have floated a jolly-boat, as Captain Dresser would say in his sailor language!”“Oh, auntie!” exclaimed Bob impetuously, “I never say ‘Oh’ like that, do I?”“Sure you’ve answered the question yourself!” replied Mrs Gilmour, speaking in her racy brogue. “That’s just what I should have had to listen to all the morning but for my thinking of that album, which I’m glad has amused you both, my dears, so well. Ah, children, children, there’s nothing like having something to do. I’ll tell you something one of the poets, Cowper I think, has written about this in his homely verse:—“‘An idler is a watch that wants both hands;As useless as it goes as when it stands!’“What d’you think of that, me dears, for an illustration of a person without occupation for mind or body—does the cap fit anybody here, eh?”Bob was silent; but Nellie took the lesson to heart.“Yes, auntie, I know it’s true enough,” she replied. “I like those lines; papa taught them to me when I was a tiny little girl. I wonder if he learnt them first from you?”“No, dearie,” said Mrs Gilmour, drawing her towards her with an affectionate caress. “Our father, your grandpapa that was, taught that little verse to us years ago, when your papa and I were of the same age as Bob and yourself; and I have never forgotten them, as you see, dearie. But, sit down now and have your luncheon. Bob, come to the table; Bob! What on earth are you staring so out of the window now for, I wonder? Bob, I say!”This repetition of his name in a louder key made the delinquent jump; and he turned round in a hurry.

“Oh, Nell!” cried Bob to his sister the same evening, some time after dinner, which, through their explorations on the beach, was somewhat later than usual—“I do wonder what that mysterious ‘something’ is the Captain keeps promising us for ‘to-morrow.’ Can he be thinking of taking us for a trip on the sea in his yacht, or what?”

“I wonder,” was all Nellie could say in reply to her brother’s remark, echoing, so to speak, his own words—“I do wonder—what he is going to do, Bob?”

Their anxious curiosity, however, availed them naught; the old sailor keeping provokingly silent and being as mute as the Sphinx on the subject, in spite of their wistful looks and watchfulness.

Throughout the evening the Captain only opened his lips to say to Mrs Gilmour, with whom he was playing one of those post-prandial games of cribbage which it had been his wont to indulge in before the advent of Bob and Nellie on the scene to interrupt their regular routine, “Fifteen four and two for his heels,” or “I’ll take three for a flush, ma’am,” as the case might be. He only made use of such-like technical phraseology common to cribbage players, limiting his conversation to the game alone; without leaving a loophole for either of the impatient listeners in the comer, who were turning over picture-books and otherwise diverting themselves, equally silently, till bedtime, to get in a word edgeways.

It was positively exasperating to Bob; especially as, the moment the old sailor chanced to notice one or other of the children eyeing him more attentively than usual on his looking up from the cards before him, he would smile knowingly and nod his head in the most waggish fashion.

“I don’t think he means anything in particular at all,” said the restless Master Bob a little later on to Nellie again. “See how funny he looks! He’s only ‘taking a rise’ out of us, as he calls it.”

“No, Bob,” said Nellie, catching another quizzical look from the Captain just at that moment, “I don’t think that. I’m sure he means something from that way he winked at us. Besides, Bob, he promised, and you know that Captain Dresser never breaks his word!”

Presently the report of the nine o’clock gun rolled through the night air, its echoes reverberating fainter and fainter until lost in the distance to seaward.

“By Jove!” exclaimed the Captain, throwing his cards on the table and rising from his seat,—“It’s time for me to say good-night, or I shan’t get any beauty sleep!”

“It’s not so very late,” said Mrs Gilmour, rising and going towards the open window looking over the Common. “What a lovely night it is!”

“Aye,” replied the old sailor, following her, “the sky is bright and clear enough, certainly.”

“Yes, what myriads of stars are out! I can see the ‘milky way’ quite plain, can’t you, children?”

“Where, auntie?” asked Nellie behind her, while Bob stepped out on to the balcony the better to see. “I don’t see it.”

Mrs Gilmour showed them the forked pathway leading up from the south and east to the zenith, looking as if powdered with the dust of stars which ‘Charles’s wain,’ as country people term the constellation, had crushed in its lumbering progress through the heavens.

Away beyond this golden ‘wake’ of starlets the more majestic planets shone in stately grandeur; while the evening star twinkled in the immensity of space, still further away to the westwards.

“But the more you look at them, the further away they appear to go,” put in Nellie. “Though, strangely enough, they don’t seem to get any smaller.”

“Aye, aye,” acquiesced the Captain. “Itisawful to think of the millions of miles they are separated from our globe, and that yet their light reaches us! Why, it is wonderful for us to reflect on this!”

“Hark! I hear a church bell ringing,” cried Bob suddenly at this point. “It sounds as if it came from the sea out yonder.”

“So it does, my boy,” answered the Captain; “but not from any church. It is the bell on the Spit buoy that you hear ringing away to the southward. It is a bad sign for to-morrow, denoting as it does a change of wind to a rainy quarter?”

“Oh dear!” exclaimed Bob, in such lugubrious tones that even Nellie laughed, although sharing his feelings about the prospect of a wet day, with the more than probable contingency of their being confined to the house. “What shall we do?”

“Cheer up, my lad, it may not be so bad after all,” cried the Captain heartily. “But, really, I must be going now; for, it is close on ten o’clock and I shall lose all my beauty sleep, as I said before. Where is young Dick?”

“Down in the kitchen with Sarah,” replied Mrs Gilmour to this question, ringing the bell as she spoke. “He’ll soon be ready if you insist on taking him away with you.”

“Humph!” ejaculated the other, “as he’s going to be my valet or factotum by the agreement we made to-day, I don’t think we’ll be able to tell whether we suit each other, ha-ha! if he remains in one house and I in another, eh?”

“Perhaps not,” said Mrs Gilmour, smiling in response with the chuckle he indulged in at the recollection of his old joke on his way home from the dockyard; and Dick entering the room at the same moment, with a broad grin on his face as if he knew what they were talking about, she added—“Sure, here he is to spake for himself! Are you ready to go home with the Captain, Dick?”

“Yes, mum,” answered the lad promptly. “Sarah told me as how the good gentleman allers went away sharp at nine o’clock, and so I comes up as the bell rung.”

“That’s right, sharp’s the word and quick’s the motion; so we’d better be off,” said the old sailor, taking his hat and stick which the housemaid, Sarah aforesaid, brought in from the hall. “Good-night, ma’am,—good-night, chickabiddies!”

“Good-night!” replied Mrs Gilmour, Nellie echoing her aunt’s adieu with a parting injunction of her own. “Pray be sure and bring back Dick to-morrow morning, Captain!”

“Perhaps, too, you’ll tell us then what you are going to do if we are good?” said Bob entreatingly, “though you would not to-night.”

“We’ll see how the cat jumps!” replied the Captain with his cheery chuckling laugh as he marched out of the hall and down the steps with Dick after him; their retreating footsteps gradually dying away until they rounded the corner of the parade, the last sound heard being that of the ferrule of the Captain’s malacca cane as it rang on the pavement, keeping time to the rhythm of his tread, and his voice repeating in the distance his quizzing rejoinder, “we’ll see how the cat jumps!”

The ‘cat’ evidently did not ‘jump’ properly the next day, or, if it jumped at all, it executed that movement most decidedly in the wrong direction; for, when morning broke, much to Bob and Miss Nell’s disgust, they found that a stormy south-easterly gale had set in, accompanied by smart showers of rain, which very unpleasant change in the aspect of the weather put all ideas of their going out entirely out of the question.

During the night, the wind, which had veered more to the eastwardly, rose considerably, drowning the clanging knell of the Spit buoy bell and rattling the windows and doors, like some desperate burglar on thoughts of plunder bent trying to effect a forcible entry.

Not satisfied with this alone, ‘Rude Boreas’ sent one of his imps down the chimney to frighten poor Nellie, who lay trembling in bed, by flapping up and down the register of the grate; while another would every now and then boldly rush up and grip hold of the house, shaking it viciously and causing it to rock from roof to basement—the rebuffed rascal then sailing away with a shriek of disappointed spite and rage, moaning and groaning like a creature in pain as it went off to vent its malice elsewhere!

Ere long the sea, unable to keep its temper under the bad treatment it received from the wind, which blew in its face most insultingly and kept continually ‘pitting and patting it,’ baker-man fashion, in a very aggravating way, began to boil up in anger, lashing itself into a passion and roaring with fury; while the noise Neptune made by and by deadened the roar of his assailant as he flung himself aloft in his struggles to grapple his nimble foe, and, missing his aim, rolled onward his boiling waves until they broke on the beach with the shock of an earthquake, amid a hurricane of foam!

The awesome sound of wave and sea combined kept Bob awake nearly all night, the same as it did poor Nellie; the noise being so strange to their London ears, although, in some respects, somewhat similar to that of the street traffic of the metropolis.

Not only did it keep him awake, but the battle of the elements made Master Bob get up much earlier than usual; for he came down to the drawing-room before Sarah had time to finish dusting the furniture.

Here he was soon afterwards joined by Nellie, who was equally ‘spry’ in her movements; and the pair amused themselves till breakfast was ready in looking out of the windows at the busy scene which the offing presented, so different to that of the previous evening, when all was quiet and calm, with Neptune gone to sleep and Boreas speaking but in a whisper!

The whilom glassy surface of the deep was now, however, a mass of short choppy waves, the sea king’s ‘white horses’ leaping up friskily in every direction and chasing each other as they rolled in landward, throwing aloft clouds of feathery spray in their sport, as if champing it from their bits. Such was the scene far as the eye could span away to the eastward, where the sky was lit up by a stray gleam or two from the long-since risen sun, who, though trying to hide himself behind a bank of blue-black clouds, was not quite able to conceal his whereabouts.

Out at sea opposite, facing south and almost on the horizon line, a lot of vessels could be seen scudding down Channel, under short canvas but outward bound, just coming in sight beyond Saint Helen’s to make sure of their landfall and then disappearing the next moment behind the Isle of Wight, which shut them out from view; while, to the left, snugly sheltered under the lee of the Ryde hills, several others had run in and anchored off the Motherbank, waiting for a change of wind before proceeding on their voyage up, along the coast, to the river—‘the river’ of the world, the Thames!

As Bob and Nellie gazed out, taking in all these varied details of the scene by degrees, they could not help being pleased, everything was so novel; but, they saw something else beyond the prospect which cast ‘a damper’ over their spirits, theoretically as well as practically.

This was the rain, which came in squalls, the smart showers hurtling down in pattering intensity, momentarily shutting out the sea and its surroundings from sight; while the swollen raindrops dashed against the window-panes like hail, trying, like the whirling storm-blast, to force a passage into every nook and cranny that lay open to attack.

“Oh dear!” sighed Bob dismally, his nose pressed like a piece of putty against the glass. “It’s awful rain, Nell; I don’t think it will ever stop!”

“Oh dear!” sighed Nellie, in responsive echo; but, just then their aunt bustled into the room, her face the picture of good-humour, in marked contrast to theirs, and she caught the mournful exclamation—“Oh dear!”

“Why, what’s the matter?” asked Mrs Gilmour, in a cheerful tone, on their turning round as she entered. “To look at you both, one would think that something dreadful had happened!”

“It’s raining,” said Bob, in a melancholy tone. “It’s raining, auntie!”

“So I can see,” retorted Mrs Gilmour. “Haven’t I got eyes of my own, sure, me dear?”

“But we shan’t be able to go out, auntie,” cried Nellie, in the most broken-hearted way. “We shan’t be able to go out!”

“You need not be so disconsolate about that, dearie,” said the other smiling. “It may not rain all day; and, if so, you’ll be able to get out between the breaks when it holds up. But, there’s Sarah ringing the bell, so, children, let us go downstairs now to the parlour; perhaps by the time we have finished breakfast it will have cleared up and be quite fine.”

These cheery words, combined possibly with a savoury odour of frizzled bacon and hot coffee that came up appetisingly from below, had the effect, for a while at least, of banishing Bob and Nellie’s gloom, and without further ado they accompanied their aunt to the breakfast-room downstairs.

Here, stretched on the hearthrug before the grate, in which a bright cosy little fire was blazing and looking uncommonly cheery, although it was now summer, lay Rover.

Without rising, he lazily greeted them by flopping his heavy tail, albeit he lifted his nose in the air and sniffed, as if in anticipation of sharing the coming meal with the welcome guests who so opportunely appeared.

“Well, I declare!” cried Mrs Gilmour, “I hope you make yourself at home, sir?”

Rover only flopped his tail the more furiously at this, his appealing brown eyes saying, as plainly as dog could speak, that he was hungry, and that if she meant to be kind he would prefer actions to words.

After breakfast, as the rain still continued, Bob got grumpy again and Nellie mopey from not being able to go out on the beach as both longed to do.

In this emergency, their aunt suggested that the unhappy children should occupy themselves in sorting and arranging in an old album, which she gave them, some of the best bits of seaweed they had collected the previous afternoon, the good lady advising them first to soak the specimens in a bowl of fresh-water, so as to get rid of the salt and sand and other impurities, besides enabling the specimens to be laid flatter in the book for subsequent pressing.

By this means, the time passed so pleasantly that Master Bob and Miss Nell were much surprised when Mrs Gilmour, who had meanwhile been busying herself about household matters, came to tell them, anon, that they must clear their things off the parlour-table on account of Sarah wanting to lay luncheon.

“Why, auntie,” cried Bob, looking up from the basin in which he was busy washing the last lot of seaweed, “we’ve hardly begun yet!”

“You’ve been a long time beginning then, sir,” replied Mrs Gilmour. “Do you know that it is past one o’clock; so that you’ve been more than three hours at your task? See, too, my dears, the rain has cleared off, and it looks as if it were going to be fine for a bit.”

“How nice, aunt Polly!” said Nellie, the neat-handed, carefully lifting up the album out of Sarah’s way so that she might spread the cloth. “I declare I never thought once of looking out of the window to see if it were still wet. Did you, Bob?”

“No,” he answered, “I was too busy helping you, Nell.”

“Ah, my dearies,” interposed Mrs Gilmour, taking advantage of the opportunity to point a moral, “you see what it is not to be idle and having something to do! If you had not both been so engrossed with your task, you, Master Bob, would have been ‘Oh-ing’ all over the house and going to each window in turn to see if the rain had stopped, looking like a bear with a sore head; while you, Miss Nell, would probably have shed as many tears as would have floated a jolly-boat, as Captain Dresser would say in his sailor language!”

“Oh, auntie!” exclaimed Bob impetuously, “I never say ‘Oh’ like that, do I?”

“Sure you’ve answered the question yourself!” replied Mrs Gilmour, speaking in her racy brogue. “That’s just what I should have had to listen to all the morning but for my thinking of that album, which I’m glad has amused you both, my dears, so well. Ah, children, children, there’s nothing like having something to do. I’ll tell you something one of the poets, Cowper I think, has written about this in his homely verse:—

“‘An idler is a watch that wants both hands;As useless as it goes as when it stands!’

“‘An idler is a watch that wants both hands;As useless as it goes as when it stands!’

“What d’you think of that, me dears, for an illustration of a person without occupation for mind or body—does the cap fit anybody here, eh?”

Bob was silent; but Nellie took the lesson to heart.

“Yes, auntie, I know it’s true enough,” she replied. “I like those lines; papa taught them to me when I was a tiny little girl. I wonder if he learnt them first from you?”

“No, dearie,” said Mrs Gilmour, drawing her towards her with an affectionate caress. “Our father, your grandpapa that was, taught that little verse to us years ago, when your papa and I were of the same age as Bob and yourself; and I have never forgotten them, as you see, dearie. But, sit down now and have your luncheon. Bob, come to the table; Bob! What on earth are you staring so out of the window now for, I wonder? Bob, I say!”

This repetition of his name in a louder key made the delinquent jump; and he turned round in a hurry.

Chapter Eight.“To-morrow come never!”“I really beg your pardon, Aunt Polly, for my inattention!” cried Bob, in a state of great excitement. “It’s the Captain!”“Sure, you don’t mean that, my dear,” said Mrs Gilmour, equally flurried, rising at once from the seat she had just taken at the head of the table. “Is it him, really?”“Oh, yes, auntie,” replied Bob, returning to his post of observation in the corner of the window. “There he is coming along the terrace, with Dick at his heels.”“Indeed, now?” said Mrs Gilmour, who had come up to Bob’s side. “Let me look for meself. Sure and you’re right. It’s him and none other, and he’s coming along at a grand pace, too!”“Hurrah!” shouted Bob. “Isn’t it jolly, auntie?”“Very jolly,” agreed Mrs Gilmour, more sedately, laughing at Bob’s ecstasies, the boy, like most youngsters, being all extremes. “I call it very nice of him, Nell, don’t you?”“Delightful!” chimed in Nellie, catching hold of Rover’s fore-paws and making him dance round the room with her in high glee, Rover barking to express his sympathy with her excitement. “How good he is—I mean Captain Dresser; not you, Master Doggy!”“It is well we know what you do mean,” said her aunt smiling, as Nell and Bob, with Rover dashing madly after their heels rushed into the hall to open the door. “Ah, the young flibberty-gibbets!”In company with the Captain and Dick, as it still continued fine, all presently sallied down to the sea, where the young holiday-makers were much surprised at the size of the waves, which seemed much bigger on nearer view than they had appeared from the drawing-room windows in the morning.Now they were so close to the waves that the spray splashed over the little party; and, it being high-water, the incoming tide, aided by the stiff south-easterly wind, which was still blowing half a gale, rolled the billows in upon the shore, dashing them against the sea-wall and rampart at the back of the castle with a mighty din, and breaking them into sheets of foam that flew over the moats and fortifications, reaching to the Common beyond—the spent water, driven back by the rocky embankment, sullenly retiring, a seething sea of soapsuds, as if Davy Jones were having a grand “washing-day.”Much as this sight pleased them, strange and wonderful to their unaccustomed eyes, they were not allowed long to enjoy it; for, the Captain declaring that another squall was coming, presently made them hurry back to the house, laden, however, with sea-wrack and spindrift.It was the same on the following day and the day after, the gale lasting until the close of the third; when it completed its course and died away as suddenly as it began, winding up with a grand thunderstorm, in which the lightning flashed and the thunder pealed through the heavens in a manner whose like, the Captain affirmed, he had never seen on that coast before.“No, never, ma’am,” cried he, emphasising the assertion with a thump of his malacca cane that almost made a hole in Mrs Gilmour’s best drawing-room carpet. “Not since I first joined the service at Portsmouth here, forty years ago, or more!”Satisfied apparently with the ‘blow’ it thus had, the weather subsequently was all that could be desired; setting in bright and fine, while it was warm enough to be almost tropical.Thenceforth, therefore, there was no more confinement to the house for the young people.Bob started off early every morning across the common to the beach, where, under the superintendence of the Captain, he and Dick were taught how to swim, the boys, it may be mentioned, learning the art all the more quickly from the fact of the old sailor’s telling them that “until they were able to keep afloat,” to use his own words, “he’d think twice before he would take ’em afloat!”So, as both were anxious to go out rowing and sailing, this threat acted as a spur to their efforts.Nellie, too, had a bathe each day; and, much she liked bobbing up and down in the usual girl-fashion from the end of the rope of the machine. By and by, also, when she had gained a little courage, she learnt to swim like Bob, whose boastings on the point had put her on her mettle; and the bathing-woman informed Mrs Gilmour one fine morning, when she accompanied Nellie to the beach and entered into conversation with her teacher, that she was “the smartest young leddy to learn as ever was.”This fact Miss Nell at once proved by swimming there and then some forty yards, more than double the distance Master Bob could accomplish, in spite of all his ‘tall talk,’ after a similar period of tuition.“You ladies can always beat us if you only try,” said the Captain gallantly, when he heard this. “I believe a woman can do anything she likes.”“You’re too complimentary, I’m afraid,” remarked Mrs Gilmour. “You don’t mean all you say.”“Don’t I, by Jove!” replied he. “Lucky for us men you do not set your mind to it; for, if you did, no poor fellow would ever have a chance of commanding his own ship!”“That’s a base slander,” cried Mrs Gilmour, laughing. “I thought you were paying us rather a doubtful compliment.”The old sailor chuckled.“I had you there, ma’am, I think, eh?” said he, blinking away with much delight. “By Jove, I had!”“But, when are you going to take us on the water?” asked Bob at this point, before his aunt could give the Captain ‘a Roland for his Oliver’ in reply to his aspersion on her sex. “You said you would, you know, when I and Dick knew how to swim.”“And I know how to, as well,” put in Nellie. “Don’t I, auntie?”“Don’t bother me, children,” growled the Captain, pretending to get in a rage. “I must be off now. I have an appointment in the Dockyard this afternoon.”“You shan’t go! you shan’t go!” cried the two together, hanging on to him on either side. “You promised to take us somewhere or do something if we were good, and that was to be to-morrow.”“To-morrow comes never!” ejaculated the old sailor, chuckling and blinking away. “‘Hodie mihi, cras tibi.’ What is that, Master Bob?”“Eh, sir?” said Bob, making a wry face. “Why, it’s Latin.”“Thank you for nothing, you young shaver!” retorted the Captain drily. “What I want to know is, what does it mean?”Bob hesitated a bit, as if puzzled to translate the phrase; but in a moment memory came to his aid.“Ah yes, I recollect now,” he said in an assured voice. “It means, I think, ‘to-day it is my turn; to-morrow it will be yours.’”“Very good, my boy,” said the Captain with a chuckle. “That’s my answer to your question just now.”“But you promised us, Captain,” cried Nellie, taking up the cudgels now that poor Bob was routed so ignominiously. “You know you did, sir—didn’t he, auntie? And the ‘to-morrow’ you meant was a long time back, before the storm and everything!”“Then I’m afraid, Miss Nellie,” he replied, making for the door, so as to secure his retreat, “it must be a very stale one; a sort of ‘to-morrow’ I wouldn’t have, if I were you, at any price!”Nellie was not to be beaten so easily, so she followed him out into the hall as he was leaving the house.“Do tell me, dear Captain,” she pleaded earnestly. “Do tell me what this wonderful something is that you have in store for us.”“I will, my dear,” replied the old sailor, succeeding by a dexterous twist in releasing the lapel of his coat from her restraining hand. “I will, my dear. I’ll whisper it to you—I will tell you to-morrow!”With this he skipped down the steps as nimbly as a two-year-old, slamming the gate behind him to secure his retreat; and Nellie could hear his hearty “Ho-ho!” as he went along the parade towards Portsmouth.“What a tiresome man the Captain is!” she exclaimed petulantly, on returning to the drawing-room, where Mrs Gilmour had remained with Bob. “It is always ‘to-morrow,’ and ‘to-morrow,’ and ‘to-morrow’; and when the ‘to-morrow’ comes, he never tells us anything!”“Fie, Nellie, you must not be impatient, my dear,” said her aunt, on hearing this outburst. “Recollect how kind and good-natured Captain Dresser has always shown himself, who ever since you two came down here for your holiday, putting himself out in every way to suit your convenience, and never regarding anything as a trouble which could conduce to your pleasure. I confess I am surprised at my little niece Nell speaking in such a way of so good a man. If the Captain keeps you in suspense, depend upon it his purpose is to make you enjoy the treat he has in his mind ten times more than if you knew all about it beforehand.”“But I hate being kept in suspense, auntie!” cried Miss Nellie rather naughtily, tossing her head indignantly, and throwing back her golden curls as if she were metaphorically pitching them at the offending old sailor. “I like to know the best or worst at once. I say, Dick, has the Captain told you anything about the treat he has for us?”Poor Dick, who had been thoughtfully left behind by the old sailor, on account of Mrs Gilmour having expressed her intention of going down to the beach with the young people in the afternoon, hardly knew how to answer the question.He did not like to tell an untruth by saying that he had no knowledge of the Captain’s plans, nor did he wish to disoblige Miss Nell, so his answer was of the non-committal order—a sort of ‘I don’t recollect’ in its way.“I can’t tell, miss,” was all he said, but, fortunately enough for him, it sufficed to throw Nellie off the scent and prevent her trying any further to worm the secret out of him; although, there is no doubt, she would have succeeded had she persevered, and Dick was on thorns until she went upstairs to get ready for going out, the little lady having an insinuating manner of her own that was well-nigh irresistible.By the time she came below again, equipped for walking, Nellie’s passing fit of ill-temper had disappeared, and she was not only her bright cheerful little self once more, but full of a project for adding to her collection a specimen of the ‘sea cucumber,’ which the Captain had told her she might find if she only hunted diligently enough.These strange marine animals belong to a species of ‘Triple Alliance’ of their own, being connected in a greater or less degree with the anemones, the ringworms, and the ‘sea urchins’; albeit, the sea cucumbers possess one very great advantage over these cousins of theirs, in being able, when they so please, to turn themselves inside out and dispense with their stomachs, as well as what would be considered other equally necessary portions of their corporate frames.When in this transformed, or ‘turn-coat’ stage of his existence, the animal consists only of an empty bag, or pocket, that has at the broadest end an apparently useless mouth, but which he still continues to make use of for feeding purposes; and, by and by, when my gentleman feels disposed to return to his original state, seemingly by the mere effort of will, his tentacles sprout out one by one, the mouth-end of his bag becomes surmounted by a sort of mushroom head, his interior person gets filled up, and the sea cucumber is himself again, “all a-taunto!”The Captain had advised Nellie to search amongst the old wooden piles of the pier, as a likely situation to find these animals, and others he named quite as curious, such as the ‘beroe’ and the ‘balanus,’ which while looking as if inanimate yet are ‘all alive,’ and, if not ‘kicking,’ certainly may be seen fishing, either with natural lines of their own or with a sort of trawl-net, very similar to which we human bipeds use.But, although Miss Nellie, with Dick acting under her directions and Bob, too, assisting in a desultory way when the superior attractions of crab-hunting on his own account did not beguile him from the pursuit, all hunted everywhere, finding every variety of young whelks, cockles, and other shell-fish ova on the pier-piles, which they were able to examine at their pleasure, it being low tide, no sea cucumbers to be seen anywhere.Nellie was in despair at her failure and felt almost inclined to cry; but, Dick at the last moment, when the search was just about to be given up, raked out a perfect specimen from a hole in the rock-work beneath one of the buttresses that was nearly awash with the water—a darksome dungeon, isolated from the vulgar herd of barnacles, and common but kindred anemones with which the stuck-up sea cucumber was too proud to associate.Naturally enough, Miss Nellie was delighted with her capture, and, she tenderly bore him home in triumph to be added to her extensive marine collection, which had now increased so considerably, that her aunt declared laughingly that she would have to build a room especially to contain it presently, her house not being big enough for the purpose.“Rubbish!” the Captain had called her first attempt at collecting, but, since then, she had learnt something under the instruction of the old sailor and displayed greater discrimination in the objects of her zeal; although still, perhaps, inclined to err in the matter of quantity over quality, leaning fondly, as most enthusiasts do, to common things.Not only was the album which her aunt had given her pasted as full as it could hold of different sorts of seaweed, known and unknown alike to Bob and herself; but she had a pile of shells big enough to build a rockery.In addition to these, her accumulation of pet specialities included a seven-fingered starfish, which is supposed by the ignorant to be peculiarly inimical to the adventurous cat that swalloweth it; and a ring-horned pandalus or ‘Aesop prawn,’ which queer creature Master Bob appropriately christened ‘The Prawnee Chief,’ much to the annoyance of Miss Nell, who had become quite grand now in her language, becoming ‘puffed up,’ as Bob said, with her newly-acquired ‘knowledge’—a ‘little’ of which, as the proverb tells us, is “a dangerous thing.”The Aesop prawn, by the way, gained the prefix to his name from having a hump on his back like the Phrygian slave, the fabulist. He is, also, distinguished by the most exquisite little rings or bands of scarlet, which seem to encircle his body; but the picturesque effect is really produced by his antennae, which the pandalus has the happy knack of arranging round his little person in the most graceful fashion.Beyond these rarities, precious above price, Nellie had gathered a quantity of cuttle-fish ‘bone,’ as it is erroneously called, sufficient to have supplied Bob and herself for a lifetime with ink-erasers—a purpose for which it is generally employed.The substance, however, is not really ‘bone,’ but is composed of thin layers of the purest white chalk, which, when the cuttle-fish is living, is embedded in the body of the animal, running through its entire length.The cuttle-fish in which this so-called bone is generally met with, is the same species from whence the well-known colour sepia used in painting is usually obtained.To make a long story short, the rest of Miss Nellie’s collection consisted of most of the various members of the crustacean family found along the south coast, which she, with the help of Bob and Dick, had picked up promiscuously.“A good deal of rubbish still, my dear,” was the Captain’s comment when he came round in the evening and Nellie showed him the latest additions to her store; “but, you’ve got one or two good things. I’ll tell you what you want, though.”“What?” she asked excitedly. “What do we want, Captain? Hush, Bob!”“An aquarium,” said he. “You see, my dear—”“Why, we’ve got one. We’ve got one already, Captain!” she cried out triumphantly, clapping her hands as she interrupted him. “Aunt Polly bought one this very morning for us.”“That was very good of her, more than you young torments deserve,” said the Captain, with his customary chuckle. “However, now you’ve got an aquarium, you must have something to put in it. Something living, I mean. These dead and gone dried-up old chaps here are of no use; although I wouldn’t be surprised if that starfish there could still tell the number of his mess if placed in water. I’m sure he’s yet alive, my dear.”“Why!” exclaimed Nellie, astonished at this, “we’ve had him hanging up like that for a week!”“Never mind that,” replied the Captain. “Those funny, fat, seven-fingered gentlemen have a nasty habit of ‘shamming Abraham,’ or pretending to have ‘kicked the bucket’ when they are all alive and hearty!”“How funny!” said Nellie, laughing. “But, what shall we get to put into the aquarium besides, Captain dear, crabs and little fish, like those we see swimming about in the sea below the castle?”“Crabs and little grandmothers!” ejaculated the Captain in great disgust. “A nice aquarium you would make of it, missy, if you hadn’t some one to look after you! Why, the crabs would eat your little fish before a week was out and then turn round and eat you!”“Dear me, that would be dreadful!” cried Nellie laughing still more, the Captain did look so comical. “But, what may we have for our aquarium, if we must not have these?”“Get? Well, let me see,” said he, blinking away furiously and moving his bushy eyebrows up and down for a moment, as if deliberating. “We’ll have some sea-anemones, to commence with. No proper aquarium is complete without them; and, when you once see them expand, showing their red and purple hues, and watch their wonderful way of moving about, you will soon be convinced that they are really animals and not vegetables, which, as I believe I told you before, many wise people for a long time supposed them to be! You just wait, missy, and you will find this out for yourself and learn more about them, too, than I can tell you.”“Oh, yes,” interposed Bob. “I saw one this morning when I was swimming, and it looked just like a big dahlia.”“Lucky for you it wasn’t a jelly-fish, or you’d have felt it as well as seen it!” rejoined the Captain grimly—“Avast there, though, we were talking about sea-anemones and other similar fry; and I was thinking that the best place for us to go to get them would be—why, by Jove, it’s the very thing!”“What’s the matter now?” said Mrs Gilmour, who had been reading a letter she had just received by the post, looking up at his sudden exclamation. “Dear me, Captain, is anything wrong?”“Nothing, ma’am, nothing,” he replied, turning round to her—“only I’ve this moment thought of a way of ‘killing two birds with one stone.’ I promised these youngsters, you know, if they were good—”“I know, I know what’s coming now,” cried Miss Nell, again interrupting him. Really she was a very rude little lady sometimes. “You’re going to tell us at last!”“What, missy?” said the Captain chuckling, as she and Bob executed a triumphal dance round him, while Dick stood grinning in the background, his face, which had filled out considerably in the last week or two, making him look very different to the lantern-jawed lad they had encountered in the train, all one smile. “What, missy?”“You’re going to take us out somewhere,” Bob and Nellie cried in concert. “You promised, you know you did!”“But, that was if you were good,” he answered, enjoying their antics. “That was the proviso, young people.”“Wearegood,” they shouted together. “Auntie says so.”The Captain put his hands to his ears to shut out their voices.“Are they good?” he asked Mrs Gilmour. “Eh, ma’am?”“Well, yes, I think so,” said she, smiling. “Good enough as far as such children can be, I suppose! I suppose I must not tell tales out of school, sure, about what a little girl said the other day when somebody, whom I won’t name, went away?”“What, what?” inquired the old sailor, looking from one to the other. “Tell me what she said!”Nellie put her hand over Mrs Gilmour’s mouth.“Hush auntie,” she cried appealingly. “You mustn’t say anything; I didn’t mean it!”“I dare say you called me a sour old curmudgeon?” hinted the Captain, pretending to be very much grieved. “Didn’t you?”“No, I didn’t,” said Nellie, jumping up and throwing her arms round his neck to kiss him. “I think you are the dearest and kindest old Captain that ever was!”“Humph!” he ejaculated in a smothered voice, addressing her aunt. “There’s no doubt, ma’am, where she gets the ‘blarney’ from. It runs in the family!”“Sure an’ small blame to her either,” retorted the other defiantly. “It’s fortunate for us women that we have something wherewith to get the better of you hard men sometimes.”“Sometimes, eh? always, I think,” growled the Captain, looking very knowing and laughing the while. “But, I won’t argue the point with you, ma’am—sure to get the worst of it if I do. Tell you what I’ll do, that is if it is agreeable to you. What say you to all of us crossing over to-morrow to the Island, eh?”“Oh, auntie, how nice!” cried Nellie, hugging her and the Captain alternately.Bob contented himself with uttering only the single word “jolly!”But, the ejaculation spoke volumes, Bob’s highest appreciation being ever expressed by that expressive but slangy term “jolly!”“Will it do, d’ye think?” said the Captain to Mrs Gilmour; there was no need of his asking either of the children, their faces giving an unhesitating assent at once, as did Dick’s. “Eh, ma’am?”“Certainly,” she replied, “if it suits you.”“Then, that’s settled,” he decided. “There’s a new steamer, called theBembridge Belle, I’ve seen advertised to run on an excursion to Seaview pier; and I think she will do very well for us; especially as she will go partly round the Island afterwards.”“I can’t say I like excursion steamers,” observed Mrs Gilmour hesitatingly; “but if you think, as an experienced sailor, that she will be safe, of course I can have no objection. You know—I’m speaking more for the children’s sake than my own, being responsible to their parents for them.”“Safe, ma’am, eh? Safe as houses!” replied the Captain, with much energy, stamping his foot on the floor as he spoke to give point to his assertion, his malacca cane not being within reach at the moment. “Otherwise, ma’am, I wouldn’t let you or the chickabiddies go in her for worlds!”“You’re quite sure, Captain?”“Faith, I’ll take my ‘davy,’ ma’am, she’s as staunch and sound as the oldBucephalus.”“Say no more, Captain,” said Mrs Gilmour. “If she’s as safe as my poor Ted’s ship, she must be safe indeed, I know.”“She is that, I believe, ma’am, on my honour.”“All right then, Captain,” replied Mrs Gilmour to this. “We’ll consider the trip arranged, then, for to-morrow, eh?”“Very good, ma’am, there’s my hand on it,” cried the Captain, rising to take his leave. “I must say ‘good-night’ now; for, it’s getting late, and I ought to turn in early if you expect me to turn out to-morrow. Good-night, Miss Nell; good-night, Bob; come along, Dick!”With which parting words, away he sailed homeward, not thinking that he had forgotten his game of cribbage with his fair hostess.Strange to say, the old sailor never once recollected his customary diversion throughout the evening!

“I really beg your pardon, Aunt Polly, for my inattention!” cried Bob, in a state of great excitement. “It’s the Captain!”

“Sure, you don’t mean that, my dear,” said Mrs Gilmour, equally flurried, rising at once from the seat she had just taken at the head of the table. “Is it him, really?”

“Oh, yes, auntie,” replied Bob, returning to his post of observation in the corner of the window. “There he is coming along the terrace, with Dick at his heels.”

“Indeed, now?” said Mrs Gilmour, who had come up to Bob’s side. “Let me look for meself. Sure and you’re right. It’s him and none other, and he’s coming along at a grand pace, too!”

“Hurrah!” shouted Bob. “Isn’t it jolly, auntie?”

“Very jolly,” agreed Mrs Gilmour, more sedately, laughing at Bob’s ecstasies, the boy, like most youngsters, being all extremes. “I call it very nice of him, Nell, don’t you?”

“Delightful!” chimed in Nellie, catching hold of Rover’s fore-paws and making him dance round the room with her in high glee, Rover barking to express his sympathy with her excitement. “How good he is—I mean Captain Dresser; not you, Master Doggy!”

“It is well we know what you do mean,” said her aunt smiling, as Nell and Bob, with Rover dashing madly after their heels rushed into the hall to open the door. “Ah, the young flibberty-gibbets!”

In company with the Captain and Dick, as it still continued fine, all presently sallied down to the sea, where the young holiday-makers were much surprised at the size of the waves, which seemed much bigger on nearer view than they had appeared from the drawing-room windows in the morning.

Now they were so close to the waves that the spray splashed over the little party; and, it being high-water, the incoming tide, aided by the stiff south-easterly wind, which was still blowing half a gale, rolled the billows in upon the shore, dashing them against the sea-wall and rampart at the back of the castle with a mighty din, and breaking them into sheets of foam that flew over the moats and fortifications, reaching to the Common beyond—the spent water, driven back by the rocky embankment, sullenly retiring, a seething sea of soapsuds, as if Davy Jones were having a grand “washing-day.”

Much as this sight pleased them, strange and wonderful to their unaccustomed eyes, they were not allowed long to enjoy it; for, the Captain declaring that another squall was coming, presently made them hurry back to the house, laden, however, with sea-wrack and spindrift.

It was the same on the following day and the day after, the gale lasting until the close of the third; when it completed its course and died away as suddenly as it began, winding up with a grand thunderstorm, in which the lightning flashed and the thunder pealed through the heavens in a manner whose like, the Captain affirmed, he had never seen on that coast before.

“No, never, ma’am,” cried he, emphasising the assertion with a thump of his malacca cane that almost made a hole in Mrs Gilmour’s best drawing-room carpet. “Not since I first joined the service at Portsmouth here, forty years ago, or more!”

Satisfied apparently with the ‘blow’ it thus had, the weather subsequently was all that could be desired; setting in bright and fine, while it was warm enough to be almost tropical.

Thenceforth, therefore, there was no more confinement to the house for the young people.

Bob started off early every morning across the common to the beach, where, under the superintendence of the Captain, he and Dick were taught how to swim, the boys, it may be mentioned, learning the art all the more quickly from the fact of the old sailor’s telling them that “until they were able to keep afloat,” to use his own words, “he’d think twice before he would take ’em afloat!”

So, as both were anxious to go out rowing and sailing, this threat acted as a spur to their efforts.

Nellie, too, had a bathe each day; and, much she liked bobbing up and down in the usual girl-fashion from the end of the rope of the machine. By and by, also, when she had gained a little courage, she learnt to swim like Bob, whose boastings on the point had put her on her mettle; and the bathing-woman informed Mrs Gilmour one fine morning, when she accompanied Nellie to the beach and entered into conversation with her teacher, that she was “the smartest young leddy to learn as ever was.”

This fact Miss Nell at once proved by swimming there and then some forty yards, more than double the distance Master Bob could accomplish, in spite of all his ‘tall talk,’ after a similar period of tuition.

“You ladies can always beat us if you only try,” said the Captain gallantly, when he heard this. “I believe a woman can do anything she likes.”

“You’re too complimentary, I’m afraid,” remarked Mrs Gilmour. “You don’t mean all you say.”

“Don’t I, by Jove!” replied he. “Lucky for us men you do not set your mind to it; for, if you did, no poor fellow would ever have a chance of commanding his own ship!”

“That’s a base slander,” cried Mrs Gilmour, laughing. “I thought you were paying us rather a doubtful compliment.”

The old sailor chuckled.

“I had you there, ma’am, I think, eh?” said he, blinking away with much delight. “By Jove, I had!”

“But, when are you going to take us on the water?” asked Bob at this point, before his aunt could give the Captain ‘a Roland for his Oliver’ in reply to his aspersion on her sex. “You said you would, you know, when I and Dick knew how to swim.”

“And I know how to, as well,” put in Nellie. “Don’t I, auntie?”

“Don’t bother me, children,” growled the Captain, pretending to get in a rage. “I must be off now. I have an appointment in the Dockyard this afternoon.”

“You shan’t go! you shan’t go!” cried the two together, hanging on to him on either side. “You promised to take us somewhere or do something if we were good, and that was to be to-morrow.”

“To-morrow comes never!” ejaculated the old sailor, chuckling and blinking away. “‘Hodie mihi, cras tibi.’ What is that, Master Bob?”

“Eh, sir?” said Bob, making a wry face. “Why, it’s Latin.”

“Thank you for nothing, you young shaver!” retorted the Captain drily. “What I want to know is, what does it mean?”

Bob hesitated a bit, as if puzzled to translate the phrase; but in a moment memory came to his aid.

“Ah yes, I recollect now,” he said in an assured voice. “It means, I think, ‘to-day it is my turn; to-morrow it will be yours.’”

“Very good, my boy,” said the Captain with a chuckle. “That’s my answer to your question just now.”

“But you promised us, Captain,” cried Nellie, taking up the cudgels now that poor Bob was routed so ignominiously. “You know you did, sir—didn’t he, auntie? And the ‘to-morrow’ you meant was a long time back, before the storm and everything!”

“Then I’m afraid, Miss Nellie,” he replied, making for the door, so as to secure his retreat, “it must be a very stale one; a sort of ‘to-morrow’ I wouldn’t have, if I were you, at any price!”

Nellie was not to be beaten so easily, so she followed him out into the hall as he was leaving the house.

“Do tell me, dear Captain,” she pleaded earnestly. “Do tell me what this wonderful something is that you have in store for us.”

“I will, my dear,” replied the old sailor, succeeding by a dexterous twist in releasing the lapel of his coat from her restraining hand. “I will, my dear. I’ll whisper it to you—I will tell you to-morrow!”

With this he skipped down the steps as nimbly as a two-year-old, slamming the gate behind him to secure his retreat; and Nellie could hear his hearty “Ho-ho!” as he went along the parade towards Portsmouth.

“What a tiresome man the Captain is!” she exclaimed petulantly, on returning to the drawing-room, where Mrs Gilmour had remained with Bob. “It is always ‘to-morrow,’ and ‘to-morrow,’ and ‘to-morrow’; and when the ‘to-morrow’ comes, he never tells us anything!”

“Fie, Nellie, you must not be impatient, my dear,” said her aunt, on hearing this outburst. “Recollect how kind and good-natured Captain Dresser has always shown himself, who ever since you two came down here for your holiday, putting himself out in every way to suit your convenience, and never regarding anything as a trouble which could conduce to your pleasure. I confess I am surprised at my little niece Nell speaking in such a way of so good a man. If the Captain keeps you in suspense, depend upon it his purpose is to make you enjoy the treat he has in his mind ten times more than if you knew all about it beforehand.”

“But I hate being kept in suspense, auntie!” cried Miss Nellie rather naughtily, tossing her head indignantly, and throwing back her golden curls as if she were metaphorically pitching them at the offending old sailor. “I like to know the best or worst at once. I say, Dick, has the Captain told you anything about the treat he has for us?”

Poor Dick, who had been thoughtfully left behind by the old sailor, on account of Mrs Gilmour having expressed her intention of going down to the beach with the young people in the afternoon, hardly knew how to answer the question.

He did not like to tell an untruth by saying that he had no knowledge of the Captain’s plans, nor did he wish to disoblige Miss Nell, so his answer was of the non-committal order—a sort of ‘I don’t recollect’ in its way.

“I can’t tell, miss,” was all he said, but, fortunately enough for him, it sufficed to throw Nellie off the scent and prevent her trying any further to worm the secret out of him; although, there is no doubt, she would have succeeded had she persevered, and Dick was on thorns until she went upstairs to get ready for going out, the little lady having an insinuating manner of her own that was well-nigh irresistible.

By the time she came below again, equipped for walking, Nellie’s passing fit of ill-temper had disappeared, and she was not only her bright cheerful little self once more, but full of a project for adding to her collection a specimen of the ‘sea cucumber,’ which the Captain had told her she might find if she only hunted diligently enough.

These strange marine animals belong to a species of ‘Triple Alliance’ of their own, being connected in a greater or less degree with the anemones, the ringworms, and the ‘sea urchins’; albeit, the sea cucumbers possess one very great advantage over these cousins of theirs, in being able, when they so please, to turn themselves inside out and dispense with their stomachs, as well as what would be considered other equally necessary portions of their corporate frames.

When in this transformed, or ‘turn-coat’ stage of his existence, the animal consists only of an empty bag, or pocket, that has at the broadest end an apparently useless mouth, but which he still continues to make use of for feeding purposes; and, by and by, when my gentleman feels disposed to return to his original state, seemingly by the mere effort of will, his tentacles sprout out one by one, the mouth-end of his bag becomes surmounted by a sort of mushroom head, his interior person gets filled up, and the sea cucumber is himself again, “all a-taunto!”

The Captain had advised Nellie to search amongst the old wooden piles of the pier, as a likely situation to find these animals, and others he named quite as curious, such as the ‘beroe’ and the ‘balanus,’ which while looking as if inanimate yet are ‘all alive,’ and, if not ‘kicking,’ certainly may be seen fishing, either with natural lines of their own or with a sort of trawl-net, very similar to which we human bipeds use.

But, although Miss Nellie, with Dick acting under her directions and Bob, too, assisting in a desultory way when the superior attractions of crab-hunting on his own account did not beguile him from the pursuit, all hunted everywhere, finding every variety of young whelks, cockles, and other shell-fish ova on the pier-piles, which they were able to examine at their pleasure, it being low tide, no sea cucumbers to be seen anywhere.

Nellie was in despair at her failure and felt almost inclined to cry; but, Dick at the last moment, when the search was just about to be given up, raked out a perfect specimen from a hole in the rock-work beneath one of the buttresses that was nearly awash with the water—a darksome dungeon, isolated from the vulgar herd of barnacles, and common but kindred anemones with which the stuck-up sea cucumber was too proud to associate.

Naturally enough, Miss Nellie was delighted with her capture, and, she tenderly bore him home in triumph to be added to her extensive marine collection, which had now increased so considerably, that her aunt declared laughingly that she would have to build a room especially to contain it presently, her house not being big enough for the purpose.

“Rubbish!” the Captain had called her first attempt at collecting, but, since then, she had learnt something under the instruction of the old sailor and displayed greater discrimination in the objects of her zeal; although still, perhaps, inclined to err in the matter of quantity over quality, leaning fondly, as most enthusiasts do, to common things.

Not only was the album which her aunt had given her pasted as full as it could hold of different sorts of seaweed, known and unknown alike to Bob and herself; but she had a pile of shells big enough to build a rockery.

In addition to these, her accumulation of pet specialities included a seven-fingered starfish, which is supposed by the ignorant to be peculiarly inimical to the adventurous cat that swalloweth it; and a ring-horned pandalus or ‘Aesop prawn,’ which queer creature Master Bob appropriately christened ‘The Prawnee Chief,’ much to the annoyance of Miss Nell, who had become quite grand now in her language, becoming ‘puffed up,’ as Bob said, with her newly-acquired ‘knowledge’—a ‘little’ of which, as the proverb tells us, is “a dangerous thing.”

The Aesop prawn, by the way, gained the prefix to his name from having a hump on his back like the Phrygian slave, the fabulist. He is, also, distinguished by the most exquisite little rings or bands of scarlet, which seem to encircle his body; but the picturesque effect is really produced by his antennae, which the pandalus has the happy knack of arranging round his little person in the most graceful fashion.

Beyond these rarities, precious above price, Nellie had gathered a quantity of cuttle-fish ‘bone,’ as it is erroneously called, sufficient to have supplied Bob and herself for a lifetime with ink-erasers—a purpose for which it is generally employed.

The substance, however, is not really ‘bone,’ but is composed of thin layers of the purest white chalk, which, when the cuttle-fish is living, is embedded in the body of the animal, running through its entire length.

The cuttle-fish in which this so-called bone is generally met with, is the same species from whence the well-known colour sepia used in painting is usually obtained.

To make a long story short, the rest of Miss Nellie’s collection consisted of most of the various members of the crustacean family found along the south coast, which she, with the help of Bob and Dick, had picked up promiscuously.

“A good deal of rubbish still, my dear,” was the Captain’s comment when he came round in the evening and Nellie showed him the latest additions to her store; “but, you’ve got one or two good things. I’ll tell you what you want, though.”

“What?” she asked excitedly. “What do we want, Captain? Hush, Bob!”

“An aquarium,” said he. “You see, my dear—”

“Why, we’ve got one. We’ve got one already, Captain!” she cried out triumphantly, clapping her hands as she interrupted him. “Aunt Polly bought one this very morning for us.”

“That was very good of her, more than you young torments deserve,” said the Captain, with his customary chuckle. “However, now you’ve got an aquarium, you must have something to put in it. Something living, I mean. These dead and gone dried-up old chaps here are of no use; although I wouldn’t be surprised if that starfish there could still tell the number of his mess if placed in water. I’m sure he’s yet alive, my dear.”

“Why!” exclaimed Nellie, astonished at this, “we’ve had him hanging up like that for a week!”

“Never mind that,” replied the Captain. “Those funny, fat, seven-fingered gentlemen have a nasty habit of ‘shamming Abraham,’ or pretending to have ‘kicked the bucket’ when they are all alive and hearty!”

“How funny!” said Nellie, laughing. “But, what shall we get to put into the aquarium besides, Captain dear, crabs and little fish, like those we see swimming about in the sea below the castle?”

“Crabs and little grandmothers!” ejaculated the Captain in great disgust. “A nice aquarium you would make of it, missy, if you hadn’t some one to look after you! Why, the crabs would eat your little fish before a week was out and then turn round and eat you!”

“Dear me, that would be dreadful!” cried Nellie laughing still more, the Captain did look so comical. “But, what may we have for our aquarium, if we must not have these?”

“Get? Well, let me see,” said he, blinking away furiously and moving his bushy eyebrows up and down for a moment, as if deliberating. “We’ll have some sea-anemones, to commence with. No proper aquarium is complete without them; and, when you once see them expand, showing their red and purple hues, and watch their wonderful way of moving about, you will soon be convinced that they are really animals and not vegetables, which, as I believe I told you before, many wise people for a long time supposed them to be! You just wait, missy, and you will find this out for yourself and learn more about them, too, than I can tell you.”

“Oh, yes,” interposed Bob. “I saw one this morning when I was swimming, and it looked just like a big dahlia.”

“Lucky for you it wasn’t a jelly-fish, or you’d have felt it as well as seen it!” rejoined the Captain grimly—“Avast there, though, we were talking about sea-anemones and other similar fry; and I was thinking that the best place for us to go to get them would be—why, by Jove, it’s the very thing!”

“What’s the matter now?” said Mrs Gilmour, who had been reading a letter she had just received by the post, looking up at his sudden exclamation. “Dear me, Captain, is anything wrong?”

“Nothing, ma’am, nothing,” he replied, turning round to her—“only I’ve this moment thought of a way of ‘killing two birds with one stone.’ I promised these youngsters, you know, if they were good—”

“I know, I know what’s coming now,” cried Miss Nell, again interrupting him. Really she was a very rude little lady sometimes. “You’re going to tell us at last!”

“What, missy?” said the Captain chuckling, as she and Bob executed a triumphal dance round him, while Dick stood grinning in the background, his face, which had filled out considerably in the last week or two, making him look very different to the lantern-jawed lad they had encountered in the train, all one smile. “What, missy?”

“You’re going to take us out somewhere,” Bob and Nellie cried in concert. “You promised, you know you did!”

“But, that was if you were good,” he answered, enjoying their antics. “That was the proviso, young people.”

“Wearegood,” they shouted together. “Auntie says so.”

The Captain put his hands to his ears to shut out their voices.

“Are they good?” he asked Mrs Gilmour. “Eh, ma’am?”

“Well, yes, I think so,” said she, smiling. “Good enough as far as such children can be, I suppose! I suppose I must not tell tales out of school, sure, about what a little girl said the other day when somebody, whom I won’t name, went away?”

“What, what?” inquired the old sailor, looking from one to the other. “Tell me what she said!”

Nellie put her hand over Mrs Gilmour’s mouth.

“Hush auntie,” she cried appealingly. “You mustn’t say anything; I didn’t mean it!”

“I dare say you called me a sour old curmudgeon?” hinted the Captain, pretending to be very much grieved. “Didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Nellie, jumping up and throwing her arms round his neck to kiss him. “I think you are the dearest and kindest old Captain that ever was!”

“Humph!” he ejaculated in a smothered voice, addressing her aunt. “There’s no doubt, ma’am, where she gets the ‘blarney’ from. It runs in the family!”

“Sure an’ small blame to her either,” retorted the other defiantly. “It’s fortunate for us women that we have something wherewith to get the better of you hard men sometimes.”

“Sometimes, eh? always, I think,” growled the Captain, looking very knowing and laughing the while. “But, I won’t argue the point with you, ma’am—sure to get the worst of it if I do. Tell you what I’ll do, that is if it is agreeable to you. What say you to all of us crossing over to-morrow to the Island, eh?”

“Oh, auntie, how nice!” cried Nellie, hugging her and the Captain alternately.

Bob contented himself with uttering only the single word “jolly!”

But, the ejaculation spoke volumes, Bob’s highest appreciation being ever expressed by that expressive but slangy term “jolly!”

“Will it do, d’ye think?” said the Captain to Mrs Gilmour; there was no need of his asking either of the children, their faces giving an unhesitating assent at once, as did Dick’s. “Eh, ma’am?”

“Certainly,” she replied, “if it suits you.”

“Then, that’s settled,” he decided. “There’s a new steamer, called theBembridge Belle, I’ve seen advertised to run on an excursion to Seaview pier; and I think she will do very well for us; especially as she will go partly round the Island afterwards.”

“I can’t say I like excursion steamers,” observed Mrs Gilmour hesitatingly; “but if you think, as an experienced sailor, that she will be safe, of course I can have no objection. You know—I’m speaking more for the children’s sake than my own, being responsible to their parents for them.”

“Safe, ma’am, eh? Safe as houses!” replied the Captain, with much energy, stamping his foot on the floor as he spoke to give point to his assertion, his malacca cane not being within reach at the moment. “Otherwise, ma’am, I wouldn’t let you or the chickabiddies go in her for worlds!”

“You’re quite sure, Captain?”

“Faith, I’ll take my ‘davy,’ ma’am, she’s as staunch and sound as the oldBucephalus.”

“Say no more, Captain,” said Mrs Gilmour. “If she’s as safe as my poor Ted’s ship, she must be safe indeed, I know.”

“She is that, I believe, ma’am, on my honour.”

“All right then, Captain,” replied Mrs Gilmour to this. “We’ll consider the trip arranged, then, for to-morrow, eh?”

“Very good, ma’am, there’s my hand on it,” cried the Captain, rising to take his leave. “I must say ‘good-night’ now; for, it’s getting late, and I ought to turn in early if you expect me to turn out to-morrow. Good-night, Miss Nell; good-night, Bob; come along, Dick!”

With which parting words, away he sailed homeward, not thinking that he had forgotten his game of cribbage with his fair hostess.

Strange to say, the old sailor never once recollected his customary diversion throughout the evening!

Chapter Nine.A Rival Collector.Nothing could have been better than the appearances of wind and weather next morning—that long-wished-for “to-morrow,” which had at last come, in spite of the Captain’s perpetual procrastination.The bright sun was glowing in a clear blue sky overhead, that was unflecked by a single cloud, while a fresh breeze blowing from the westwards to prevent the air from becoming stagnant; and the barometer, at “set Fair,” made all prophets of evil, if such there were about, keep their lips tightly closed and say nothing to damp the spirits of the expectant voyagers.“Hullo, Nell!” shouted Bob, drumming on the balustrade of the staircase outside his bedroom to attract her attention and rouse her up. “Are you awake yet?”Nellie’s answer to this question was a “staggerer” to Master Bob, as he termed it in his choice phraseology.She appeared in the passage that passed her door fully dressed.“I got up when Sarah rose, and have been ready to go downstairs for the last hour,” she said calmly, with a conscious pride. “You’d better look sharp with your dressing, Bob, for it is past six o’clock. Unless you start off soon to the beach, too, for your bathe, you’ll never be back in time for breakfast, which is going to be earlier this morning so that we may catch the steamer comfortably.”“My good gracious!” exclaimed Bob, jamming his right foot into his left boot in his hurry and wasting a minute or more in wriggling it out again. “I thought I was ever so early, and up before any one!”“Ah, me dear,” cried out Mrs Gilmour from below; “you’ll have to catch a weasel asleep, sure, before you can hope, sir, to get ahead of us in this house. I called Sarah long ere either of you were stirring!”This was a climax; and so, without making any reply to aunt Polly’s pertinent statement of fact, save a stifled laugh at the expense of Miss Nell, who had prided herself on having, as she thought, got the start of them all, Bob expediting his dressing in the most summary fashion, hurried off as speedily as possible across the common for his matutinal dip.He was accompanied, as a matter of course, by Rover, who was ready and waiting for him on the terrace outside, barking and bounding about like a demented dog who had parted company with his usual stock of common-sense.“Down, Rover!” cried Bob, when the faithful fellow, in the exuberance of his joy on seeing his young master come out of the house, leaped up and licked his face, preventing him from closing the door properly as he was about to do. “Behave yourself, sir!”Rover, however, thought there were different ways of “behaving himself,” the chief in his estimation being to show his affection to those who were kind to him, whom he loved with all the intensity of his great canine heart; and so, ranking obedience to orders as only second to this potent law of his life, he frisked and jumped and playfully tousled Bob until he finally made him start at a swinging trot for the beach, the frolicsome retriever galloping in advance one moment, the next stopping in his mad career onward to give out a loud bark and wag his tail in encouragement to his master to try and catch him up, if he could!Bob bent his steps towards the coastguard-station on the eastern side of the sea-wall, near the new pier, which was the regular meeting-place for him and Dick every morning for their bathe; and here, punctually at “six Bells,” or seven o’clock, he found on the present occasion his fellow-swimmer along with the Captain.The latter, he could hear as he approached, was having an animated discussion with Hellyer, the chief boatman, on the subject of torpedoes, which Hellyer believed in, but which the Captain utterly pooh-poohed, saying that in his opinion they were of little, if any, use in naval warfare.He was laying down the law with great unction when Bob came up to them.“Don’t tell me,” he cried, “of your ‘whitehead’ going twenty knots an hour and exploding its charge of gun-cotton under a ship’s bottom; for, where and what would those on board the ship be doing all the time—standing still, I suppose, to be shot at and doing nothing in their own defence?”“Aye, that’s true, sir,” said Hellyer; “but—”“Remember, too,” continued the Captain, “the torpedo, even of the most improved type, can only keep up this speed of twenty knots for a distance of five hundred yards, within which range the boat discharging it would have to approach before sending it off at the vessel attacked, which of course would be fool enough to let it come to such close quarters without riddling it? Oh, yes, you tell that to the marines!” Hellyer laughed.“You carry too many guns for me, sir,” said he good-humouredly. “I can’t stand up against you, Captain, once you tackle me fairly!”“Too strong, eh?” rejoined the Captain, triumphant at getting the better of his opponent. “Of course I am! Your argument, Hellyer, won’t hold water. Besides, should one of those spiteful little inventions succeed in getting near an ironclad without being seen and sunk, the torpedo nets of the ship would prevent the infernal machine, as these new-fashioned fallals were called in the old days, from exploding against her hull. I, for my part, would be quite content to stand the brunt of a torpedo attack on board a ship fitted with protecting nets and quick-firing guns. By Jove, I’d guarantee that Jack Dresser wouldn’t be the one that was licked!”“I’d bet that same, sir,” agreed Hellyer heartily, but seeing Bob he added, “Ah, here’s the young ge’man I fished out of the sea t’other night. He doesn’t look any the worse for being nigh drownded. He warn’ hurt, sir, much, were he?”“Not he,” said the Captain. “He’s learnt to swim, though, since then, and the other boy, too; so, if they choose to tumble in again off the ramparts and get into deep water, there won’t be so much bother in hauling them out; eh, Bob?”“No, Captain,” replied Bob, who was busy undressing; and, within a few moments he had plunged into the sea, and was swimming out with a brave firm stroke in a way that fully justified the Captain’s praise of his natatory powers, shouting out at intervals his customary war-cry—“Jolly!”Nor was Dick far behind, although perhaps not quite so plucky in venturing beyond his depth, now that he had no especial motive as on that memorable evening already alluded to by Hellyer the coastguardsman, for running the risk; while, as for Rover, he fairly revelled in the water, paddling round and round Bob and Dick, thereby executing a series of concentric circles never dreamt of by the Egyptian mathematician whose problems have been the torment of the boys of all ages.The sea was so warm and pleasant that they stopped in such an unconscionable time as to necessitate the Captain’s hailing them three times to come out before they obeyed the order, and even then did so lothfully, making the old sailor sing out to them the more imperatively—“Come out, come out of that, you young rascals!” he cried, shaking his stick menacingly. “If you are not out and dressed in five minutes, by Jove I’ll start without you; for, I can’t keep the ladies waiting. By Jove, I will!”This threat had the desired result of quickening the boys’ movements; Dick, if the slowest in the water, being the sharper of the two in getting into his clothes. Rover was even speedier still, having only to give himself one good shake, administering in the action a shower-bath of drops to the Captain, when, there he was all ready, with a smart new curly black coat, glistening from his dip, as if he had just been to the hairdresser’s and had a brush up for the occasion!On the way back to Mrs Gilmour’s house to breakfast, the Captain and Dick being specially invited this morning, so that they might leave together immediately afterwards for the steamer without losing any time, the boys had great fun with Rover and the towels.These the retriever was always in the habit of carrying home, though Bob would not let him have them at once, right out, to take in his mouth as he left the beach.He would first show them to Rover, with a “Look here, good dog!”Then Bob would put the bundle of towels in a hole in the shingle, or under some big boulder, which did not improve them, by the way; Rover observing everything his young master did with the keenest attention, barking the while, and with every hair of his mane bristling with excitement.After thus hiding the towels, if it could be called hiding where every detail of the operation was watched by the dog, Bob would, as he did on the present occasion, set out on his return across the common; Master Rover prancing in front of him, and anxiously keeping his speaking brown eyes fixed on his face, awaiting the order which he knew to be impending for him to go back and fetch the bundle left behind.It was always a struggle for Bob to keep his countenance steady, the slightest suspicion of a smile being interpreted by Rover as an intimation that he was at liberty to “go and fetch,” without a word being uttered; and, this morning, the struggle was intensified by the presence of the Captain, who was in a joking mood, and tried all he could to draw off Rover’s attention from Bob.However, in spite of these difficulties, the latter succeeded in repressing any signs of emotion in his face until they got to the landmark in the middle of the common, when, opening his mouth at last, Bob said, almost in a whisper, the magic words, “Go and fetch!”Low as was the tone in which the command was given, Rover heard it; and then, in an instant, off he flew, like an arrow from the bow, with his bushy tail stretched out straight behind, bottle-brush fashion, making him resemble a dark-coloured fox in the distance, with the hounds in full cry after him.The last they saw of him was the end of his tufted tail disappearing over the sea-wall at the place where Bob had secreted the towels, so on they went in the expectation of Rover presently overtaking the party with the towels, which he seldom failed to do before the roadway skirting the other side of the common was reached, the retriever being generally very rapid in his movements.On this occasion, however, the Captain with the boys not only got as, far as the terrace, but arrived at the gate of Mrs Gilmour’s house, without there being any appearance of Rover’s return.He and the towels were alike “conspicuous by their absence.”What could have happened?Listening attentively, they could hear presently the sound of a dog barking in the direction of the sea, and to Bob’s mind, at least, there was no doubt that the bark was the bark of Rover.“He cannot get the towels from under the stone,” cried Bob, turning back. “It is either that, or somebody has stolen them, or something. I must go and see what’s the matter.”“We’ll all come,” said the Captain. “I should like to see the affair out.”So saying, he wheeled round too, and with Dick started off in pursuit of Bob, who, going at the run, was already some distance ahead, on his return journey to the beach.The Captain stepped out well, however, and he and Dick got up just in time to settle a little dispute, in which Bob, Rover, and an ugly-looking man, very like a gipsy and evidently a tramp, were the parties interested.The man had one end of the bundle of towels grasped in both his hands, while Rover was holding on like grim death to the other; the dog growling, and tugging away so violently between each growl, that the tramp had hard work to keep hold of his prize.Bob, on his part, had caught up a piece of broken timber, and was advancing to the faithful dog’s aid.But a boy like Bob, even with the help of such a valiant protector as the retriever, could do little or nothing against a burly, ruffianly giant, six feet high, and broad in proportion.The arrival of the Captain on the scene with Dick, however, altered the aspect of affairs considerably.The gipsy tramp, who had sworn to Bob, and at him too, that the bundle was his own, and that he was walking quietly along the shore in search of work, when he was assailed by “that savage dog o’ yourn there,” now said, on the Captain’s telling him curtly to drop the towels, or he would have him locked up, that he had “only picked ’em up on the beach, and didn’t mean no harm by it to nobody, that he didn’t.”“Then the sooner you are off out of this, the better for you, my friend,” said the Captain, on the man’s letting go the bundle of towels, which Rover at once carried off in triumph and laid at Bob’s feet. “Be off with you, you rascal, at once!” The man took his advice, and slouched away round the castle, soon disappearing from their sight; when, much excited by the unexpected little incident that they now would have to detail to Mrs Gilmour and Nellie, besides being full of Rover’s bravery and sagacity, they took their way home again, for the second time, across the common, the clock of old Saint Thomas’s church in the distance striking as they turned their faces homeward—“One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—Nine!”“Look sharp, lads, or we’ll be late for the steamer!” cried the old sailor, as they hurried along, setting the example by hastening onwards as fast as his little legs, aided by his ever-present malacca cane, could carry him. “I’m told that theBembridge Bellewill leave the pier at ten o’clock without fail, wind and weather permitting, and it has just struck nine—all through your loitering and skylarking in the water, Master Bob and you Dick, and that long palaver we had afterwards with your friend the towel-thief.”On reaching the house, where breakfast was all ready awaiting their arrival, the old Captain, while hurrying through the meal, found time to chaff Nellie about this “rival collector,” as he called the prowling tramp when narrating all about the adventure that had detained them; telling her she would have to look to her laurels, and gather up all the odds and ends she could find, on the beach, or else this gentleman, who had displayed such zeal that morning in trying to add to his collection, would certainly outvie hers.“Now, children,” said Mrs Gilmour, when breakfast and chaff had both come to an end, repeating the Captain’s favourite word of command, “Look sharp!”Her preparations had all been made beforehand; and without losing another moment, she and the Captain, with Bob and Nellie behind them, started off, Dick, who had been taken care of meanwhile by Sarah in the kitchen, bringing up the rear with a substantial-looking hamper on his shoulder.Almost breathless, alike from excitement and their rapid pace, they made their way seawards, to where theBembridge Bellewas blowing off her steam alongside the pier, sounding her whistle to tell belated passengers like themselves that they had better put their best foot foremost if they wished to reach her in time.“All aboard?” inquired the captain of the steamer from his post on the port paddle-box, hailing the porter of the pier ashore, when they, the very last of the late-comers, had scrambled across the gangway; and the porter having signified that no one now was in sight, the blue-capped gentleman standing on the paddle-box touched the engine-room telegraph, and gave the signal to “Go ahead!”In another minute, the fore and aft hawsers that had previously made her fast to the pier were cast-off, and her paddles began to revolve with a heavy splashing sound, like that of flails in a farmyard threshing out the grain.“Starboard!” sang out her skipper, now mounting from the paddle-box to the bridge above. “Hard over, my man!”“Starboard it is, sir,” replied the helmsman, rapidly twirling the spokes of the wheel as he spoke. “It’s right over, sir.”“Steady!” now sang out the skipper, meaning that the vessel’s head had been sufficiently turned in the direction he desired. “Steady; keep her so.”“Steady it is, sir,” repeated the man at the wheel like a parrot, to show that the order had been understood and acted upon. “Steady it is.”“Port a trifle now.”“Aye, aye, sir,” returned the helmsman, reversing the wheel. “Port it is, sir; two points over.”“Steady.”“Steady it is.”Whereupon, a straight course being now laid for the little port to which they were bound on the Isle of Wight opposite, theBembridge Bellesteamed ahead, splashing and dashing through the water, that rippled over with laughter in the bright sunshine, lightening up its translucent depths, and leaving a broad silvery wake of dancing eddies behind her.

Nothing could have been better than the appearances of wind and weather next morning—that long-wished-for “to-morrow,” which had at last come, in spite of the Captain’s perpetual procrastination.

The bright sun was glowing in a clear blue sky overhead, that was unflecked by a single cloud, while a fresh breeze blowing from the westwards to prevent the air from becoming stagnant; and the barometer, at “set Fair,” made all prophets of evil, if such there were about, keep their lips tightly closed and say nothing to damp the spirits of the expectant voyagers.

“Hullo, Nell!” shouted Bob, drumming on the balustrade of the staircase outside his bedroom to attract her attention and rouse her up. “Are you awake yet?”

Nellie’s answer to this question was a “staggerer” to Master Bob, as he termed it in his choice phraseology.

She appeared in the passage that passed her door fully dressed.

“I got up when Sarah rose, and have been ready to go downstairs for the last hour,” she said calmly, with a conscious pride. “You’d better look sharp with your dressing, Bob, for it is past six o’clock. Unless you start off soon to the beach, too, for your bathe, you’ll never be back in time for breakfast, which is going to be earlier this morning so that we may catch the steamer comfortably.”

“My good gracious!” exclaimed Bob, jamming his right foot into his left boot in his hurry and wasting a minute or more in wriggling it out again. “I thought I was ever so early, and up before any one!”

“Ah, me dear,” cried out Mrs Gilmour from below; “you’ll have to catch a weasel asleep, sure, before you can hope, sir, to get ahead of us in this house. I called Sarah long ere either of you were stirring!”

This was a climax; and so, without making any reply to aunt Polly’s pertinent statement of fact, save a stifled laugh at the expense of Miss Nell, who had prided herself on having, as she thought, got the start of them all, Bob expediting his dressing in the most summary fashion, hurried off as speedily as possible across the common for his matutinal dip.

He was accompanied, as a matter of course, by Rover, who was ready and waiting for him on the terrace outside, barking and bounding about like a demented dog who had parted company with his usual stock of common-sense.

“Down, Rover!” cried Bob, when the faithful fellow, in the exuberance of his joy on seeing his young master come out of the house, leaped up and licked his face, preventing him from closing the door properly as he was about to do. “Behave yourself, sir!”

Rover, however, thought there were different ways of “behaving himself,” the chief in his estimation being to show his affection to those who were kind to him, whom he loved with all the intensity of his great canine heart; and so, ranking obedience to orders as only second to this potent law of his life, he frisked and jumped and playfully tousled Bob until he finally made him start at a swinging trot for the beach, the frolicsome retriever galloping in advance one moment, the next stopping in his mad career onward to give out a loud bark and wag his tail in encouragement to his master to try and catch him up, if he could!

Bob bent his steps towards the coastguard-station on the eastern side of the sea-wall, near the new pier, which was the regular meeting-place for him and Dick every morning for their bathe; and here, punctually at “six Bells,” or seven o’clock, he found on the present occasion his fellow-swimmer along with the Captain.

The latter, he could hear as he approached, was having an animated discussion with Hellyer, the chief boatman, on the subject of torpedoes, which Hellyer believed in, but which the Captain utterly pooh-poohed, saying that in his opinion they were of little, if any, use in naval warfare.

He was laying down the law with great unction when Bob came up to them.

“Don’t tell me,” he cried, “of your ‘whitehead’ going twenty knots an hour and exploding its charge of gun-cotton under a ship’s bottom; for, where and what would those on board the ship be doing all the time—standing still, I suppose, to be shot at and doing nothing in their own defence?”

“Aye, that’s true, sir,” said Hellyer; “but—”

“Remember, too,” continued the Captain, “the torpedo, even of the most improved type, can only keep up this speed of twenty knots for a distance of five hundred yards, within which range the boat discharging it would have to approach before sending it off at the vessel attacked, which of course would be fool enough to let it come to such close quarters without riddling it? Oh, yes, you tell that to the marines!” Hellyer laughed.

“You carry too many guns for me, sir,” said he good-humouredly. “I can’t stand up against you, Captain, once you tackle me fairly!”

“Too strong, eh?” rejoined the Captain, triumphant at getting the better of his opponent. “Of course I am! Your argument, Hellyer, won’t hold water. Besides, should one of those spiteful little inventions succeed in getting near an ironclad without being seen and sunk, the torpedo nets of the ship would prevent the infernal machine, as these new-fashioned fallals were called in the old days, from exploding against her hull. I, for my part, would be quite content to stand the brunt of a torpedo attack on board a ship fitted with protecting nets and quick-firing guns. By Jove, I’d guarantee that Jack Dresser wouldn’t be the one that was licked!”

“I’d bet that same, sir,” agreed Hellyer heartily, but seeing Bob he added, “Ah, here’s the young ge’man I fished out of the sea t’other night. He doesn’t look any the worse for being nigh drownded. He warn’ hurt, sir, much, were he?”

“Not he,” said the Captain. “He’s learnt to swim, though, since then, and the other boy, too; so, if they choose to tumble in again off the ramparts and get into deep water, there won’t be so much bother in hauling them out; eh, Bob?”

“No, Captain,” replied Bob, who was busy undressing; and, within a few moments he had plunged into the sea, and was swimming out with a brave firm stroke in a way that fully justified the Captain’s praise of his natatory powers, shouting out at intervals his customary war-cry—“Jolly!”

Nor was Dick far behind, although perhaps not quite so plucky in venturing beyond his depth, now that he had no especial motive as on that memorable evening already alluded to by Hellyer the coastguardsman, for running the risk; while, as for Rover, he fairly revelled in the water, paddling round and round Bob and Dick, thereby executing a series of concentric circles never dreamt of by the Egyptian mathematician whose problems have been the torment of the boys of all ages.

The sea was so warm and pleasant that they stopped in such an unconscionable time as to necessitate the Captain’s hailing them three times to come out before they obeyed the order, and even then did so lothfully, making the old sailor sing out to them the more imperatively—

“Come out, come out of that, you young rascals!” he cried, shaking his stick menacingly. “If you are not out and dressed in five minutes, by Jove I’ll start without you; for, I can’t keep the ladies waiting. By Jove, I will!”

This threat had the desired result of quickening the boys’ movements; Dick, if the slowest in the water, being the sharper of the two in getting into his clothes. Rover was even speedier still, having only to give himself one good shake, administering in the action a shower-bath of drops to the Captain, when, there he was all ready, with a smart new curly black coat, glistening from his dip, as if he had just been to the hairdresser’s and had a brush up for the occasion!

On the way back to Mrs Gilmour’s house to breakfast, the Captain and Dick being specially invited this morning, so that they might leave together immediately afterwards for the steamer without losing any time, the boys had great fun with Rover and the towels.

These the retriever was always in the habit of carrying home, though Bob would not let him have them at once, right out, to take in his mouth as he left the beach.

He would first show them to Rover, with a “Look here, good dog!”

Then Bob would put the bundle of towels in a hole in the shingle, or under some big boulder, which did not improve them, by the way; Rover observing everything his young master did with the keenest attention, barking the while, and with every hair of his mane bristling with excitement.

After thus hiding the towels, if it could be called hiding where every detail of the operation was watched by the dog, Bob would, as he did on the present occasion, set out on his return across the common; Master Rover prancing in front of him, and anxiously keeping his speaking brown eyes fixed on his face, awaiting the order which he knew to be impending for him to go back and fetch the bundle left behind.

It was always a struggle for Bob to keep his countenance steady, the slightest suspicion of a smile being interpreted by Rover as an intimation that he was at liberty to “go and fetch,” without a word being uttered; and, this morning, the struggle was intensified by the presence of the Captain, who was in a joking mood, and tried all he could to draw off Rover’s attention from Bob.

However, in spite of these difficulties, the latter succeeded in repressing any signs of emotion in his face until they got to the landmark in the middle of the common, when, opening his mouth at last, Bob said, almost in a whisper, the magic words, “Go and fetch!”

Low as was the tone in which the command was given, Rover heard it; and then, in an instant, off he flew, like an arrow from the bow, with his bushy tail stretched out straight behind, bottle-brush fashion, making him resemble a dark-coloured fox in the distance, with the hounds in full cry after him.

The last they saw of him was the end of his tufted tail disappearing over the sea-wall at the place where Bob had secreted the towels, so on they went in the expectation of Rover presently overtaking the party with the towels, which he seldom failed to do before the roadway skirting the other side of the common was reached, the retriever being generally very rapid in his movements.

On this occasion, however, the Captain with the boys not only got as, far as the terrace, but arrived at the gate of Mrs Gilmour’s house, without there being any appearance of Rover’s return.

He and the towels were alike “conspicuous by their absence.”

What could have happened?

Listening attentively, they could hear presently the sound of a dog barking in the direction of the sea, and to Bob’s mind, at least, there was no doubt that the bark was the bark of Rover.

“He cannot get the towels from under the stone,” cried Bob, turning back. “It is either that, or somebody has stolen them, or something. I must go and see what’s the matter.”

“We’ll all come,” said the Captain. “I should like to see the affair out.”

So saying, he wheeled round too, and with Dick started off in pursuit of Bob, who, going at the run, was already some distance ahead, on his return journey to the beach.

The Captain stepped out well, however, and he and Dick got up just in time to settle a little dispute, in which Bob, Rover, and an ugly-looking man, very like a gipsy and evidently a tramp, were the parties interested.

The man had one end of the bundle of towels grasped in both his hands, while Rover was holding on like grim death to the other; the dog growling, and tugging away so violently between each growl, that the tramp had hard work to keep hold of his prize.

Bob, on his part, had caught up a piece of broken timber, and was advancing to the faithful dog’s aid.

But a boy like Bob, even with the help of such a valiant protector as the retriever, could do little or nothing against a burly, ruffianly giant, six feet high, and broad in proportion.

The arrival of the Captain on the scene with Dick, however, altered the aspect of affairs considerably.

The gipsy tramp, who had sworn to Bob, and at him too, that the bundle was his own, and that he was walking quietly along the shore in search of work, when he was assailed by “that savage dog o’ yourn there,” now said, on the Captain’s telling him curtly to drop the towels, or he would have him locked up, that he had “only picked ’em up on the beach, and didn’t mean no harm by it to nobody, that he didn’t.”

“Then the sooner you are off out of this, the better for you, my friend,” said the Captain, on the man’s letting go the bundle of towels, which Rover at once carried off in triumph and laid at Bob’s feet. “Be off with you, you rascal, at once!” The man took his advice, and slouched away round the castle, soon disappearing from their sight; when, much excited by the unexpected little incident that they now would have to detail to Mrs Gilmour and Nellie, besides being full of Rover’s bravery and sagacity, they took their way home again, for the second time, across the common, the clock of old Saint Thomas’s church in the distance striking as they turned their faces homeward—“One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—Nine!”

“Look sharp, lads, or we’ll be late for the steamer!” cried the old sailor, as they hurried along, setting the example by hastening onwards as fast as his little legs, aided by his ever-present malacca cane, could carry him. “I’m told that theBembridge Bellewill leave the pier at ten o’clock without fail, wind and weather permitting, and it has just struck nine—all through your loitering and skylarking in the water, Master Bob and you Dick, and that long palaver we had afterwards with your friend the towel-thief.”

On reaching the house, where breakfast was all ready awaiting their arrival, the old Captain, while hurrying through the meal, found time to chaff Nellie about this “rival collector,” as he called the prowling tramp when narrating all about the adventure that had detained them; telling her she would have to look to her laurels, and gather up all the odds and ends she could find, on the beach, or else this gentleman, who had displayed such zeal that morning in trying to add to his collection, would certainly outvie hers.

“Now, children,” said Mrs Gilmour, when breakfast and chaff had both come to an end, repeating the Captain’s favourite word of command, “Look sharp!”

Her preparations had all been made beforehand; and without losing another moment, she and the Captain, with Bob and Nellie behind them, started off, Dick, who had been taken care of meanwhile by Sarah in the kitchen, bringing up the rear with a substantial-looking hamper on his shoulder.

Almost breathless, alike from excitement and their rapid pace, they made their way seawards, to where theBembridge Bellewas blowing off her steam alongside the pier, sounding her whistle to tell belated passengers like themselves that they had better put their best foot foremost if they wished to reach her in time.

“All aboard?” inquired the captain of the steamer from his post on the port paddle-box, hailing the porter of the pier ashore, when they, the very last of the late-comers, had scrambled across the gangway; and the porter having signified that no one now was in sight, the blue-capped gentleman standing on the paddle-box touched the engine-room telegraph, and gave the signal to “Go ahead!”

In another minute, the fore and aft hawsers that had previously made her fast to the pier were cast-off, and her paddles began to revolve with a heavy splashing sound, like that of flails in a farmyard threshing out the grain.

“Starboard!” sang out her skipper, now mounting from the paddle-box to the bridge above. “Hard over, my man!”

“Starboard it is, sir,” replied the helmsman, rapidly twirling the spokes of the wheel as he spoke. “It’s right over, sir.”

“Steady!” now sang out the skipper, meaning that the vessel’s head had been sufficiently turned in the direction he desired. “Steady; keep her so.”

“Steady it is, sir,” repeated the man at the wheel like a parrot, to show that the order had been understood and acted upon. “Steady it is.”

“Port a trifle now.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” returned the helmsman, reversing the wheel. “Port it is, sir; two points over.”

“Steady.”

“Steady it is.”

Whereupon, a straight course being now laid for the little port to which they were bound on the Isle of Wight opposite, theBembridge Bellesteamed ahead, splashing and dashing through the water, that rippled over with laughter in the bright sunshine, lightening up its translucent depths, and leaving a broad silvery wake of dancing eddies behind her.

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