On the birthday of his sacred Majesty, Charles took Matilda to see his ship, the 48-gun frigate Immaculate, commanded by a well-known martinet.

Her spirit fell within her, like the Queen of Sheba's, as she gazed, but trembled to set down foot upon the trim order and the dazzling choring.
She might have survived the strict purity of all things, the deck lines whiter than Parian marble, the bulwarks brighter than the cheek-piece of a grate, the breeches of the guns like goodly gold, and not a whisker of a rope's end curling the wrong way, if only she could have espied a swab, or a bucket, or a flake of holy-stone, or any indicament of labor done.

"Artis est celare artem;" this art was unfathomable.
Matilda was fain to assure herself that the main part of this might be superficial, like a dish-cover polished with the spots on, and she lost her handkerchief on purpose to come back and try a little test-work of her own.

This was a piece of unstopped knotting in the panel of a hatchway, a resinous hole that must catch and keep any speck of dust meandering on the wayward will of wind.

Her cambric came out as white as it went in! She surrendered at discretion, and became the prize of Carroway.
Now people at Bridlington Quay declared that the lieutenant, though he might have carried off a prize, was certainly not the prize-master; and they even went so far as to say that "he could scarcely call his soul his own." The matter was no concern of theirs, neither were their conclusions true.