this time the mournful wind kept bringing
us wails of the death-bell from the shore,
telling us that another soul had been launched
from Vigo into the dark uncharted sea. The
green hills looked bare and doleful. No one
cared to be told that those green-mantled slopes
were vineyards, and those lined plateaus olive-
gardens. The land wind seemed to blow yellow
fever, and we longed to get away. We all got
dull; and, very soon, only four of us were left
on the long garden-seat that was placed near the
cabin stairs. The rest had turned in, after much
of that sham peripateticism that the old
traveller affects on board ship. We—a little
man in a snuff-coloured coat, whom we looked
upon as a great authority, because he had
been wrecked once off Cape Saint Vincent,
where he lost his own wife and saved somebody
else's; the thin egg merchant from Corunna; a
blustering Portuguese captain; Blowhard, and
myself—were all that were left. As for the
steward, he was busy seeing some cases hauled
up from the hold, and some orange-trees for
England duly lowered without damage into the
same cockroach-haunted vault; where the ship's
cat, and some Spanish sailors, who played at cards
night and day, were the only inmates; lurking
about under boxes and bales, like proscribed
Royalists or Chouans flying the guillotine.

Blowhard—jovial, calm, and imperturbable—
having let off his steam by a destructive battery
of oaths against the city of Vigo, its laws and
regulations, ordered cigars and hot glasses
of grog round; which every one submitted to
with a remonstrating look, as if grog was not
their nightly custom.

I thought old Blowhard was coming out with a
yarn when I saw him look at us all round, then
stretch out his legs, button up his blue frock-
coat very tight, stir round his grog, and look
up at the toothed top of the funnel. Sure enough
out it came:

"Gentlemen," he said (and I leave out his sea
jargon, telling the story my own way), and all
our eyes turned on him—" gentlemen, as your
jawing-tackle does not seem in running order,
I suppose I shan't offend any of you much
by telling you, over our grog, a disagreeable
little thing that happened to me once when
I commanded the Dancing Jinny, bound from
Bristol to Mangrove River, near Old Calabar, to
trade and barter with the natives, muskets and
gunpowder against palm-oil and ivory. A very
disagreeable thing it was—a 'nation disagreeable
thing; but I got well out of it, or you would not
see me here.

"Now, I may as well go back, and say that I
am the son of a Gloucestershire parson; and
that ever since I knew a frigate from a felucca I
had determined to go to sea; yes, ever since I
could gnaw a biscuit I had resolved to be a
second Captain Cook or Lord Nelson, I did not
specially care which. I had been bitten somehow
by my nurse's stories about a certain uncle
of mine who had died in Jamaica of yellow fever.
I could listen all day to those stories about his
pigtail and flute playing; the ships he drew in our
nursery-books I could still see, and admire; and
I was often shown, on state occasions, the ingenious
quill necklace he had made when a prisoner in
the Isle of France. In vain my father used to
take me to an old one-legged Greenwich
pensioner in the neighbourhood, who had been
bribed to tell me horrible stories of shipwrecks
and sea-fights. These only made me more anxious
than before to see blue water. In vain old
Liddy, our nurse, told me that she had foretold
my Uncle Charles's death, by the death-smell
that came from his clothes that hung in the
nursery cupboard the night he died at Kingstown. I
ran off to climb the mainmast of a poplar in the
orchard, or to scramble about the roof of the
pigeon-house. I tried all sorts of ways of
hardening myself—slept on the bedroom floor,
fancying it a hammock; and, one night, slept up in
the yew-tree in the churchyard to see how I
could bear a high wind and the night-watch.
My favourite amusement was to load an old
horse-pistol with powder; and, in some safe field,
get up an imaginary single combat between
myself and Will Watch, the bold smuggler, or
Blackbeard, the pirate, in which I always got
the better of it, punctuating the coup de grace
by a bang of my weapon, which alarmed the
whole village, and frightened my father nearly
into fits just as he was putting the crowning
wind-up to his Easter sermon.

"I reproach myself for it now; but I
suppose it is the same with every one who has
once got that roving spoonful of salt in his
blood. I cared for nothing. The old rectory
with the apricot-tree under the bedroom
windows, the swallows' nests, the rats so
tumultuous at night, the garden, the
beehives, the trout stream, the ferreting—all
grew flat and wearisome to me. I cared for
nothing but punting about the mill-pond,
swimming, cruising in a tub, and aping in any
way a seafaring life.

"Now, I dare say at that time, if I had been
shown, as through a window, some of the
awful scenes I've witnessed at sea—those blue
metal waves that seem ready to wash down the
stars and drown the world, vessels smashing on
to the beak of a reef, and such-like, I should
have been a bit cowed; but then I had never
swung in a hammock, or knocked a weevil
out of a biscuit; but I had a stout heart, and
I don't think Robinson Crusoe himself could
have kept the longing quiet more than a day
or two.

"I remember, as well as if it was yesterday, the
night my father, tired out at last, settled I should
go to sea. He had set me to learn Gray's Elegy for
swinging myself from one poplar-tree to another
by a rope, and then fighting Bogey Griffin, the
bully of the village, for saying I was not fit even
for a powder-monkey on board the Lord Mayor's
barge. I had been reading a book of voyages,
and gone to bed so full of them, that I lay awake
fancying I heard, in every bough that shook at
the window, a sheet snap or a mast go by the
board. I was still awake when my poor father
came up, as he always did the last thing, to put