on the heaving sea, her idle sails flapped against her masts
with a regularly recurring noise, and her bowsprit would seem to rise
higher with the water's swell, to dip again with a jerk that made each rope
tremble and tauten. On the forecastle, some half-dozen soldiers,
in all varieties of undress, were playing at cards, smoking,
or watching the fishing-lines hanging over the catheads.

So far the appearance of the vessel differed in no wise from that
of an ordinary transport. But in the waist a curious sight presented itself.
It was as though one had built a cattle-pen there. At the foot
of the foremast, and at the quarter-deck, a strong barricade,
loop-holed and furnished with doors for ingress and egress,
ran across the deck from bulwark to bulwark. Outside this cattle-pen
an armed sentry stood on guard; inside, standing, sitting,
or walking monotonously, within range of the shining barrels
in the arm chest on the poop, were some sixty men and boys,
dressed in uniform grey. The men and boys were prisoners of the Crown,
and the cattle-pen was their exercise ground. Their prison was
down the main hatchway, on the 'tween decks, and the barricade,
continued down, made its side walls.

It was the fag end of the two hours' exercise graciously permitted
each afternoon by His Majesty King George the Fourth to prisoners
of the Crown, and the prisoners of the Crown were enjoying themselves.
It was not, perhaps, so pleasant as under the awning on the poop-deck,
but that sacred shade was only for such great men as the captain
and his officers, Surgeon Pine, Lieutenant Maurice Frere, and,
most important personages of all, Captain Vickers and his wife.

That the convict leaning against the bulwarks would like to have