My Shipmate Louise, Volume II

It had now become so much one thing on top of another with us, and everything happening in a moment, so to speak, too: first our being left on the wreck all in a breath as it were: then our being picked up by this barque without the dimmest prospect, as my instincts advised me, of our falling in with the _Countess Ida_ this side of Bombay: then our destitute condition aboard a craft whose skipper's sanity I was now honestly beginning to distrust, and whose people, if he did not lie, were for the most part a gang of scoundrels: then this sudden narrow shave of being boarded by above a score of miscreants whose undoubted hope was to seize the _Lady Blanche_ and to use her in the room of their own extinguished brig; I say it was so much one thing on top of another -- a catalogue of adventures scarcely conceivable in these safe-going days of the ocean mailboat, though real enough and in one way or another frequent enough in my time, I mean in the time of this narrative -- that I protest something of the dismay which possessed Miss Temple visited me, though I struggled hard in the direction of a composed face, as we talked over the incident of the morning, and took a view of the singular staring figure who had charge of the barque, and directed our eyes at the crew, all hands of whom hung about forward, briskly yarning, as I might suppose, about the Spanish longboat's attempt (and with God knows what sympathy, I would think, as I peered at the groups), or as we sent our eager gaze into the blue and brilliant ocean distance in search of any little leaning flake of white that might flatter us with promise of escape from our disagreeable situation.

‘I have fully and immovably formed my opinion on two points,' said Miss Temple to me as we continued to pace the deck together for some half hour after the boat had disappeared astern: ‘one is, that Captain Braine is mad; and the other that he is firmly bent on making you serve him as his mate.'