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The skipper promptly accepted the offer and, besides, arranged a system by which I was to write Mr Purchase's messages, carry them from the crow's-nest to the ground, and deliver them over to one of two midshipmen in waiting, who would at once scamper off with it, while I ascended the Jacob's ladder again for further information, to be transmitted by the second midshipman if, meanwhile, the first had not had time to return.
By the time that we invalids were landed it was close upon sunset, and under Purchase's guidance we were all conducted up to the largest house in the place, where, in one of the rooms, Murdoch was still hard at work attending to the batch of patients that were the result of that day's work.
We had just comfortably finished our meal, and Captain Perry had completed his final dispositions, when the look-out who had temporarily taken Mr Purchase's place in the crow's-nest came down with the intelligence that the sea-breeze was setting in, and might be expected to reach the becalmed craft within the next ten minutes; whereupon the first lieutenant and I returned to our post of observation to watch the progress of the approaching slavers, and report upon it from time to time.
I've been thinking a good deal about that to-day; and the opinion I have arrived at is that Harrison played the game once too often, with this result " and he waved his right hand comprehensively about him, indicating the tent, the makeshift dinner, and our condition generally. "What I mean is this," he continued, in reply to Purchase's glance of inquiry.
Fortunately for Purchase, the sentence was not quite so severe as it sounded, for the Osprey one of the men-o'-war in harbour happened to have a vacancy for a lieutenant, and the Commodore, after hearing Purchase's story of the disaster from his own lips, unhesitatingly gave him the appointment.
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