opportunity you give me of addressing you; but will
not detain you with any lengthened observations.
I have the honour to be a cousin of yours
on the Uncle Sam side; this young friend
of mine is a nearer relation of yours on the
Devonshire side; we are both pretty nigh used up,
and much in want of supper. I thank you for
your welcome, and I am proud to take you by
the hand, sir, and I hope I see you well."

These last words were addressed to a jolly
looking chairman with a wooden hammer near
him: which, but for the captain's friendly grasp,
he would have taken up, and hammered the table
with.

"How do you do, sir?" said the captain,
shaking this chairman's hand with the greatest
heartiness, while his new friend ineffectually
eyed his hammer of office; "when you come to
my country, I shall be proud to return your
welcome, sir, and that of this good company."

The captain now took his seat near the fire,
and invited his companion to do the like—whom
he congratulated aloud, on their having "fallen
on their feet."

The company, who might be about a dozen
in number, were at a loss what to make of, or
do with, the captain. But, one little old man
in long flapping shirt collars: who, with only
his face and them visible through a cloud of
tobacco smoke, looked like a superannuated
Cherubim: said sharply,

"This is a Club."

"This is a Club," the captain repeated to his
young friend. "Wa'al now, that's curious!
Didn't I say, coming along, if we could only
light upon a Club?"

The captain's doubling himself up and slapping
his leg, finished the chairman. He had
been softening towards the captain from the
first, and he melted. "Gentlemen King
Arthurs," said he, rising, "though it is not the
custom to admit strangers, still, as we have
broken the rule once to-night, I will exert my
authority and break it again. And while the
supper of these travellers is cooking;" here his
eye fell on the landlord, who discreetly took the
hint and withdrew to see about it; "I will
recal you to the subject of the seafaring man."

"D'ye hear!" said the captain, aside to the
young fisherman; "that's in our way. Who's
the seafaring man, I wonder?"

"I see several old men here," returned the
young fisherman, eagerly, for his thoughts were
always on his object. "Perhaps one or more
of the old men whose names you wrote down in
your book, may be here."

"Perhaps," said the captain; "I've got my
eye on 'em. But don't force it. Try if it won't
come nat'ral."

Thus the two, behind their hands, while
they sat warming them at the fire. Simultaneously,
the Club beginning to be at its ease
again, and resuming the discussion of the
seafaring man, the captain winked to his fellow-
traveller to let him attend to it.

As it was a kind of conversation not altogether
unprecedented in such assemblages, where
most of those who spoke at all, spoke all at
once, and where half of those could put no
beginning to what they had to say, and the other
half could put no end, the tendency of the
debate was discursive, and not very intelligible.
All the captain had made out, down to the
time when the separate little table laid for two
was covered with a smoking broiled fowl and
rashers of bacon, reduced itself to these heads.
That, a seafaring man had arrived at The
King Arthur's Arms, benighted, an hour or so
earlier in the evening. That, the Gentlemen
King Arthurs had admitted him, though all
unknown, into the sanctuary of their Club. That,
they had invited him to make his footing good
by telling a story. That, he had, after some
pressing, begun a story of adventure and
shipwreck: at an interesting point of which he
suddenly broke off, and positively refused to finish.
That, he had thereupon taken up a candlestick,
and gone to bed, and was now the sole occupant
of a double-bedded room up-stairs. The question
raised on these premises, appeared to be,
whether the seafaring man was not in a state
of contumacy and contempt, and ought not to
be formally voted and declared in that condition.
This deliberation involved the difficulty
(suggested by the more jocose and irreverent of
the Gentlemen King Arthurs) that it might
make no sort of difference to the seafaring
man whether he was so voted and declared, or
not.

Captain Jorgan and the young fisherman ate
their supper and drank their beer, and their
knives and forks had ceased to rattle and their
glasses had ceased to clink, and still the discussion
showed no symptoms of coming to any conclusion.
But, when they had left their little
supper-table and had returned to their seats by
the fire, the Chairman hammered himself into
attention, and thus outspake.

"Gentlemen King Arthurs; when the night is
so bad without, harmony should prevail within.
When the moor is so windy, cold, and bleak,
this room should be cheerful, convivial, and
entertaining. Gentlemen, at present it is neither
the one, nor yet the other, nor yet the other.
Gentlemen King Arthurs, I recal you to
yourselves. Gentlemen King Arthurs, what are you?
You are inhabitants—old inhabitants—of the
noble village of Lanrean. You are in council
assembled. You are a monthly Club through all
the winter months, and they are many. It is your
perroud perrivilege, on a new member's entrance
or on a member's birthday, to call upon that
member to make good his footing by relating to
you some transaction or adventure in his life, or
in the life of a relation, or in the life of a friend,
and then to depute me as your representative to
spin a teetotum to pass it round. Gentlemen
King Arthurs, your perroud perrivileges shall
not suffer in my keeping. N—no! Therefore,
as the member whose birthday the present
occasion has the honour to be, has gratified you;
and as the seafaring man overhead has not
gratified you; I start you fresh, by spinning the
teetotum attached to my office, and calling on