what the old carpenter considered his _chef-d'oeuvre_, and a curious
affair this same masterpiece was. In the first place it was forty-two
feet long over all, and only three and a half feet beam--the planking
was not much above an eighth of an inch in thickness, so that if one
of the crew had slipped his foot off the stretcher, it must have gone
through the bottom. There was a standing order that no man was to go
into it with shoes on. She was to pull six oars, and her crew were the
captains of the tops, the primest seamen in the ship, and the steersman
no less a character than the skipper himself.

Her name, for I love to be particular, was the Dragon-fly; she was
painted out and in of a bright red, amounting to a flame colour--oars
red--the men wearing trousers and shirts of red flannel, and red net
night caps--which common uniform the captain himself wore, I think I
have said before, that he was a very handsome man, and when he had taken
his seat, and the _gigs_, all fine men, were seated each with his oar
held upright upon his knees ready to be dropped into the water at the
same instant, the craft and her crew formed to my eye as pretty a
plaything for grown children as ever was seen. "Give way, men," the
oars dipped as clean as so many knives, without a sparkle, the gallant
fellows stretched out, and away shot the Dragon-fly, like an arrow, the
green water foaming into white smoke at the bows, and hissing away in
her wake.

She disappeared in a twinkling round a reach of the canal where we were
anchored, and we, that is the gunroom-officers, all except the second
lieutenant, who had the watch, and the master, now got into our own gig
also, rowed by ourselves, and away we all went in a covey; the purser
and doctor, and three of the middies forward, Thomas Cringle, gent.,
pulling the stroke oar, with old Moses Yerk as coxswain;--and as