"England is most inconveniently placed," Captain Truck dryly remarked as he witnessed this manoeuvre. "Were this island only out of the way, now, we might stand on as we head, and leave those man-of-war's men to amuse themselves all night with backing and filling in the roads of Portsmouth."
"I hope there is no danger of that little boat's overtaking this large ship!" exclaimed Sir George, with a vivacity that did great credit to his philanthropy, according to the opinion of Mr. Dodge at least; the latter having imbibed a singular bias in favour of persons of condition, from having travelled in an _eilwagen_ with a German baron, from whom he had taken a model of the pipe he carried but never smoked, and from having been thrown for two days and nights into the society of a "Polish countess," as he uniformly termed her, in the _gondole_ of a _diligence_, between Lyons and Marseilles. In addition, Mr. Dodge, as has just been hinted, was an ultra-freeman at home--a circumstance that seems always to react, when the subject of the feeling gets into foreign countries.
"A feather running before a lady's sigh would outsail either of us in this air, which breathes on us in some such fashion as a whale snores, Sir George, by sudden puffs. I would give the price of a steerage passage, if Great Britain lay off the Cape of Good Hope for a week or ten days."
"Not I; I wish the old island no harm, nor a worse climate than it has got already; though it lies as much in our way just at this moment, as the moon in an eclipse of the sun. I bear the old creature a great-grandson's love--or a step or two farther off, if you will,--and come and go too often to forget the relationship. But, much as I love her, the affection is not strong enough to go ashore on her shoals, and so we will go about, Mr. Leach; at the same time, I wish from my heart that two-lugged rascal would go about his business."
The ship tacked slowly but gracefully, for she was in what her master termed "racing trim;" and as her bows fell off to the eastward, it became pretty evident to all who understood the subject, that the two little lug-sails that were "eating into the wind," as the sailors express it, would weather upon her track ere she could stretch over to the other shoal. Even the landsmen had some feverish suspicions of the truth, and the steerage passengers were already holding a secret conference on the possibility of hiding the pursued in some of the recesses of the ship. "Such things were often done," one whispered to another, "and it was as easy to perform it now as at any other time."