stem to stern.

When the captain, followed by a half-dozen seamen rushed

down the companionway, he found Billy sitting astride the

prostrate form of the mate. His great fingers circled the man's

throat, and with mighty blows he was dashing the fellow's

head against the hard floor. Another moment and murder

would have been complete.

"Avast there!" cried the captain, and as though to punctuate

his remark he swung the heavy stick he usually carried

full upon the back of Billy's head. It was that blow that

saved the mate's life, for when Billy came to he found himself

in a dark and smelly hole, chained and padlocked to a

heavy stanchion.

They kept Billy there for a week; but every day the

captain visited him in an attempt to show him the error of

his way. The medium used by the skipper for impressing

his ideas of discipline upon Billy was a large, hard stick.

At the end of the week it was necessary to carry Billy above

to keep the rats from devouring him, for the continued beatings

and starvation had reduced him to little more than an

unconscious mass of raw and bleeding meat.

"There," remarked the skipper, as he viewed his work by

the light of day, "I guess that fellow'll know his place next

time an officer an' a gentleman speaks to him."

That Billy survived is one of the hitherto unrecorded

miracles of the power of matter over mind. A man of intellect,

of imagination, a being of nerves, would have succumbed to the

shock alone; but Billy was not as these. He

simply lay still and thoughtless, except for half-formed ideas

of revenge, until Nature, unaided, built up what the captain

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