Honest Jack Bold, as he called himself, was not deficient in self-command. Sipping his brandy with the utmost coolness, he turned to Alice, and, motioning towards Slap-Jack, boiling over within six inches of him, observed, in his high-quavering voice:
"Favoured lover, I presume! Visits here, I hope, with our good aunt's sanction. Seems a domestic servant by his dress, though I gather, from the coarseness of his language, he has served before the mast!—a sad come-down, sweet Alice! for a girl with your advantages. These seaman, I fancy, are all given to liquor. Offer your bachelor something to drink, and score it, if you please, to my account. A sad come-down!—a sad come-down! Why burn me, Mistress Alice, with your good looks, you might almost have married a gentleman—you might, indeed! Sink me to the lowest depths of matrimonial perdition, if you might not!"
Slap-Jack could have stood a good deal, but to be offered a dram by a rival in this off-hand way, through the medium of his own sweetheart, was more than flesh and blood could swallow. In defiance of Alice's entreaties, who was horribly frightened at the prospect of a quarrel, and as pale now as she had been flushed a few minutes back, he shook a broad serviceable fist in the captain's face, and burst out—
"A gentleman! you swab! What do you know about gentlemen? All the sort as you've seen is them that hangs at Tyburn; and look, if you're not rove up there yourself some fine morning, my saucy blade, with your night-cap over your ears, and a bunch of rue in your hand. Gentlemen indeed! Now look you here, Captain John Bold, or whatever other alias your papers may show when they're overhauled, if ever I catches of you in here alone, a parsecutin' of my Alice, or even hears o' your so much as standing' off-and-on, a watchin' for her clearin' out, or on the open moor, or homeward bound, or what not, I'll smash that great red nose of yours as flat as a Port-Royal jelly-fish, you ugly, brandy-faced, bottle-nosed, lop-sided son of a gun!"
The captain had borne with considerable equanimity his adversary's quarrelsome gestures and threats of actual
