"Where," said one of the seamen,--"where do you go to, my lad?"

"Why, if I can't get shipped to-night, I shall trundle down to Cove
immediately, so as to cross at Passage before daylight, and take my
chance of shipping with some of the outward-bound that are to sail, if
the wind holds, the day after to-morrow. There is to be no pressing
when the blue Peter flies at the fore--and that was hoisted this
afternoon, I know, and the foretopsail will be loose to-morrow.

"D--n my wig, but the small chap is right," roared one.

"I've a bloody great mind to go down with him," stuttered another,
after several unavailing attempts to weigh from the bench, where he had
brought himself to anchor.

"Hurrah!" yelled a third, as he hugged me, and nearly suffocated me
with his maudlin caresses, "I trundles wid you too, my darling, by the
piper!"

"Have with you, boy--have with you," shouted half-a-dozen other voices,
while each stuck his oaken twig through the handkerchief that held his
bundle, and shouldered it, clapping his straw or tarpaulin hat, with a
slap on the crown, on one side of his head, and staggering and swaying
about under the influence of the potfen, and slapping his thigh, as he
bent double, laughing like to split himself, till the water ran over
his cheeks from his drunken half-shut eyes, while jets of tobacco-juice
were squirting in all directions.

I paid the reckoning, urging the party to proceed all the while, and
indicating Pat Doolan's at the Cove as a good rendezvous; and,