"And this brings me to my most serious difficulty.  I have no vessel available for the service excepting your schooner, and no officer, except yourself, whom I can place in command of her.  You must not feel hurt, young gentleman, if I say that, under ordinary circumstances, I should as soon think of attempting to fly as of confiding so difficult and dangerous a service to a mere midshipman.  But what the commodore has written concerning you, supplemented by what I heard last night from your own lips, encourages me to hope and to believe that, young as you are, you may yet prove worthy of the confidence that I have decided to repose in you.  You appear to be one of those rare young men who carry an old head upon young shoulders; you have proved yourself capable of thinking for yourself, and of possessing the courage to act upon your own responsibility; you exhibited very sound judgment and resource in that affair of the _Indian Queen_, and also in the affair of the Indiaman, which you certainly saved from capture.  I am therefore going to take upon myself the responsibility of giving you a roving commission to hunt down and destroy that pirate.