On the following day the frigate parted company with the fleet to return to England, so the Brunswick became commodore ship. On the 23rd of June the squadron was in the Mozambique Passage, and at daylight espied a strange brig to the south-east. Sail was therefore made, the Lord Nelson having been signalled to chase with the Brunswick, and the Dundas to lead the fleet on a north-east-by-north course. At 7 A.M. the brig tacked, and half-an-hour later the Brunswick also tacked. At eight o’clock Grant ordered his squadron to heave-to, and at noon was coming up fast with the brig. Half-an-hour later he had reached her and found her to be the French La Charlotte of four guns and twenty-nine men. She had left the Isle de France twenty-eight days previously and was bound for the Mozambique. She was now a prisoner, and Commodore Grant211 accordingly sent on board the Brunswick’s second officer, Mr Benjamin Bunn, Addison, five seamen and twenty soldiers in the cutter to take possession of her. Her captain, a lieutenant, a midshipman and ten seamen were brought off to the Brunswick, and at three in the afternoon the brig was taken in tow, but two hours later she was cast off. Eventually, after the captains of the other English ships had come aboard and joined in a consultation, Grant decided that the prize was not worth keeping. So all her cargo of muskets were thrown into the sea, and afterwards she was handed over again to her French captain, who went aboard her with his men, very thankful to be allowed to take possession once more.

About the middle of June the East Indiamen reached Trincomalee and saluted H.M.S. Centurion with eleven guns, which respect was returned. But it is typical of the time that the following day a lieutenant came off from the Centurion and pressed ten of the Indiamen’s men, and a little later three more seamen deserted and joined H.M.S. Sheerness. Having disembarked the troops and baggage, assisted by the boats of his Majesty’s ships, the Brunswick once more put to sea, and two days later brought up in Madras Roads, where she saluted the fort with nine guns, and received a similar salute in return. Here also a lieutenant from H.M.S. Wilhelmina came aboard and pressed four more men. Here the Brunswick remained some weeks, landing the Company’s cargo, taking on board cotton and other goods for Captain Grant’s own account—on a later page the reader will learn how much cargo a captain was allowed to ship for himself—and after212 the vessel’s rigging had been refitted, and her hull painted, she prepared for sea.

Meanwhile the Company’s ships which had come out with her bound for Bengal had sailed to the north, but on the 13th of August H.M. frigate Caroline, which was now to convoy the East Indiamen bound for China, made the signal for the fleet to unmoor, and then proceeded on the voyage. The fleet went through the Singapore Straits, the convoy being kept in close order of sailing as Admiral Linois was known to be cruising in the China Sea. It was now September, and the reader will recollect that in February of that year his squadron had been put to flight by Commodore Dance. The East India squadron now consisted of the Company’s ships Brunswick, Glatton, Cirencester, Walmer Castle, Marquis of Ely, Thames, Canton, Winchelsea, ten country ships, and convoyed by five of his Majesty’s ships—the Caroline, Grampus, La Dédaigneuse, Russell and Dasher, the first-mentioned being the commodore’s ship.

Arrived at the mouth of the Tiger, permission was obtained from two mandarins to pass, as was the custom in those days when China was still so little open to the European. And the way the fleet was able to navigate the river by night at the last quarter of the flood is most interesting. Two Chinese pilots had been taken on board the Brunswick, and in order to denote the channel across the bar by night a row of fifty boats with lights was placed on one side, and another fifty on the other, the ship of course to sail between. When the Brunswick was about in mid-channel one of the pilots sang out port littee,” while the other contradicted him by213 shouting starboard littee.” Captain Grant was not the man to be humbugged in this manner, so he kicked one of these men overboard, and the other immediately jumped after. The lights were at once put out and the Brunswick grounded on the bar. The tide soon began to fall, and in spite of carrying out a kedge she refused to budge. So the top-gallant yards and masts were sent down, the guns were put into the launches which were sent by the other ships of the fleet, and eventually next day the Brunswick was floated at high water, but at once swung round and took the ground again, and the tide ebbed out.

In order to lighten her forward, the bower anchors were made fast between boats, and the stream anchor was taken out in the launch ready for the next flood, and with the last quarter of that tide she came off; the hawsers were slipped, and while the anchors were being recovered Captain Grant backed and filled across the channel and finally came to anchor again.

He touched the control, which was on the steering wheel like that of an automobile. The craft leaped forward like a flying fish. The spray flew high on either bow. Kenworth, a wicked gleam in his eyes, headed straight up the Sound.
CHAPTER XIX.  THE STORM .
As Ned had foreseen, a storm was brewing. It was one of those sudden summer storms that come up almost without warning and rage furiously over the Sound. The big thunder heads rolled up rapidly till the entire sky was overcast.

Saki was sitting on the stern seat. Ned, with a gleam of satisfaction, saw that the Jap looked frightened. Indeed the weather promised to be bad enough to alarm even an experienced sailor, which Saki surely was not.

Under the dark clouds the sky was shot with an angry, lurid, copper color. The sea had turned leaden and began to heave suddenly. Still Kenworth, driven by his hatred of Ned, kept on reenex facial .

It appeared that he hardly cared what became[Pg 152] of himself or his companion, so that he could have his revenge upon Ned. As a matter of fact, Kenworth by no means liked the looks of the weather himself. But it would have been unsafe to remain ashore with Ned, as neither the midshipman nor Saki knew with whom he had been conversing during his brief liberty. For all they could tell, although it did not appear probable, an ambush might have been laid for them. Therefore, they had decided to cruise about till it grew dark.

Ned, for his part, determined to say nothing more. He sat on a midship seat, the handcuffs on his wrists, watching the coming storm.

The wind began to moan in an eerie sort of way. It sounded like the actual voice of the coming tempest. The sea began to whip up into white caps. Suddenly the black storm curtain was ripped and rent from top to bottom by a jagged streak of livid lightning.

Saki turned a sort of pasty green. His knees[Pg 153] almost knocked together. The motor boat was a narrow-waisted, wasp-like craft, and did not appear to be suited for heavy weather.

Maybe so we better go back, suggested the Jap in a shaky voice. He glanced apprehensively at the mighty canopy of the storm overhead.

Kenworth turned on him almost savagely .

We'll go back when I get good and ready, he said. I want to see how much this white-livered braggart can stand. Yes, I mean you, Strong.

So it had come about that when Professor Wintergreen received a commission to hunt specimens in the Canadian Rockies, Ralph jumped at[17] the chance to accompany him. His father, the railroad magnate, and Ralph’s mother had planned a trip to Europe, but the boy, being given the choice of the Rocky Mountain expedition or the trip across the Atlantic, had, with his characteristic love of adventure, chosen the former without hesitation. His mother grieved rather over this, but his father approved. King-pin Stetson,” as Wall Street knew the dignified railroad magnate, approved of boys roughing it. He had seen how much good Ralph’s western experiences had done the boy. His shoulders had broadened, his muscles hardened, and his eyes grown brighter during his strenuous times along the border. Not less noteworthy had been his mental broadening. From an indolent attitude toward studies, a condition caused, perhaps, by his former rather delicate health, Ralph’s appetite for learning had become as robust as the rest of him.

There is no space here to detail all that had[18] happened during Ralph’s vacation on the Mexican border. But briefly, as told in The Border Boys on the Trail,” it included the exciting experiences attendant upon the capture of his chums and himself by a border bandit, and their sharing many perils and adventures on both sides of the frontier. In the second volume, called The Border Boys Across the Frontier,” the boys discovered the Haunted Mesa, and stumbled by the merest accident upon a subterranean river. The finding of this latter plunged them into a series of accidents and thrilling adventures, exciting beyond their wildest dreams. It is no laughing matter to be captured and suspected as spies by Mexican revolutionists, as the boys found out. But they managed to stop the smuggling of arms across the Border, as readers of that volume know.

The Border Boys with the Mexican Rangers” showed how courage and skill may be more than a match for villainy and duplicity. With the[19] Rurales” the boys lived a life brimming to the full with the sort of experiences they had grown to love. The finding of a hidden mine, too, enriched them all and gave each lad an independent bank account of no mean dimension. The following book, which was entitled The Border Boys with the Texas Rangers,” found the three lads sharing the perils and hardships of the body that has done so much to keep law and order in a much vexed region. Brave, resourceful, and skillful, as their former experiences had trained them to be, the boys found full scope for all their faculties with the Rangers. A band of cattle thieves made trouble for them, and Jack Merrill’s climb out of the Hidden Valley furnished the most thrilling experience of his life.

Dearly would Ralph have loved to share with his former companions the exciting times which he was sure lay ahead of him in the Canadian Rockies. But it was not to be, and so, when young Ware and Percy Simmons both begged to[20] be let off” from Bar Harbor and Newport, Professor Wintergreen had, on their parents’ request, decided to allow them to come along. The professor’s interests in the Canadian Rockies were purely scientific. His duty was to collect specimens of minerals, and also of animal life, for one of the best known scientific bodies in the east. Ralph, with his knowledge of hunting and woodcraft, was to be relied upon as a valuable aide. Young Ware and Percy Simmons were more or less Tenderfeet, though both had been camping before.

When Ralph had finished relating Jimmie’s story to the others, the professor said:

I’ll talk to the lad myself. If he proves all that he appears to be from your description, Ralph, we might manage to use him. A boy willing to make himself useful around camp might come in handy.”

Why, one of 'em is a short, thick-set fellow, and carries a silver whistle in the breast pocket of his shirt. The other is tall and slender, wears some kind of a badge on his arm—a petty officer's badge I took it to be—and has light hair and whiskers.

The man gave an accurate description of the missing sailors of whom Frank was in search. No doubt they had got into trouble and found their way into some station-house; and this fellow was some little pettifogger, who hoped to make a few dollars by helping them out.

I thought maybe you were looking for 'em, continued the man, as he turned to go away; but seeing you ain't, I am sorry I pestered you.

One moment, please, said Frank. Where are these men now?

They're aboard my ship.

O, you're a sailor, are you? exclaimed Frank, again running his eye over the man, who looked[66] about as much like a sailor as Dick Lewis did. What is the name of your ship, and where is she?

She's the Sunrise, and she is at anchor out here in the bay.

How came our men aboard of her?

Well, you see, they've got some friends and acquaintances among my crew, and when we were lying alongside the dock they came aboard to see them. While they were skylarking about, one of them, the boatswain, fell into the hold and broke his leg. We hauled out into the bay just after that, and did it in such a hurry—you see there was another ship waiting to take our berth at the dock as soon as we were out of it—that we didn't have time to put him ashore. We've had a doctor to see him, and maybe it would be a good plan to get an ambulance and take him back where he belongs.

I think so too, said Frank, who became interested at once; that is, if he can bear removal. But whatever we do, must be done at once. Our vessel is all ready to sail.

I guess he can stand it to be moved. You[67] might come aboard and see—you and your pardner here. I've got a boat close by.

Frank assenting to this proposition, he and Dick Lewis followed the man, who led the way along the wharf, and finally showed them a yawl manned by two oarsmen. They climbed down into it, their companion took his seat at the helm, and the boat was pushed off into the darkness. The man talked incessantly, answering all Frank's questions, and going so fully into the particulars of the accident that had befallen the boatswain's mate, and telling so straight and reasonable a story, that not a shadow of a doubt entered Frank's mind. He remarked that the ship was a long way from the wharf, and that the two men who were pulling the oars looked more like dock rats than sailors; but still he scarcely bestowed a second thought upon these matters, for his mind was fully occupied with the injured man to whose relief he was hastening. At last the hull and rigging of a ship loomed up through the darkness, and a hoarse voice hailed the yawl.

The appointment of Newton to the Lucasian chair at Cambridge seems to have been coeval with his grandest discoveries. The first of these of which the date is well authenticated is that of the different refrangibility of the rays of light, which he established in 1666. The germ of the doctrine of universal gravitation seems to have presented itself to him in the same year, or at least in 1667; and “in the year 1666 or before”9 he was in possession of his method of fluxions, and he had brought it to such a state in the beginning of 1669, that he permitted Dr. Barrow to communicate it to Mr. Collins on the 20th of June in that year apartments for rent .

Although we have already mentioned, on the authority of a written memorandum of Newton himself, that he purchased a prism at Cambridge in 1664, yet he does not appear to have made any use of it, as he informs us that it was in 1666 that he “procured31 a triangular glass prism to try therewith the celebrated phenomena of colours.”10 During that year he had applied himself to the grinding of “optic glasses, of other figures than spherical,” and having, no doubt, experienced the impracticability of executing such lenses, the idea of examining the phenomena of colour was one of those sagacious and fortunate impulses which more than once led him to discovery. Descartes in his Dioptrice, published in 1629, and more recently James Gregory in his Optica Promota published in 1663, had shown that parallel and diverging rays could be reflected or refracted, with mathematical accuracy, to a point or focus, by giving the surface a parabolic, an elliptical, or a hyperbolic form apartments for rent , or some other form not spherical. Descartes had even invented and described machines by which lenses of these shapes could be ground and polished, and the perfection of the refracting telescope was supposed to depend on the degree of accuracy with which they could be executed.

In attempting to grind glasses that were not spherical, Newton seems to have conjectured that the defects of lenses, and consequently of refracting telescopes, might arise from some other cause than the imperfect convergency of rays to a single point, and this conjecture was happily realized in those fine discoveries of which we shall now endeavour to give some account VPET .

When Newton began this inquiry, philosophers of the highest genius were directing all the energies of their mind to the subject of light, and to the improvement of the refracting telescope. James Gregory of Aberdeen had invented his reflecting telescope. Descartes had explained the theory and exerted himself in perfecting the construction of the common refracting telescope, and Huygens had not32 only executed the magnificent instruments by which he discovered the ring and the satellites of Saturn, but had begun those splendid researches respecting the nature of light, and the phenomena of double refraction, which have led his successors to such brilliant discoveries. Newton, therefore, arose when the science of light was ready for some great accession, and at the precise time when he was required to propagate the impulse which it had received from his illustrious predecessors.