two
hundred yards of the southern shore. His mate had gone away for the
night to the opposite side of the bay, to visit his parents, who resided
in that neighbourhood; and the remaining crew consisted of but two
seamen, both young and somewhat reckless men, and the ship-boy. Taking
the boy with them to keep the ship's boat afloat, and wait their return,
the two sailors went ashore, and, setting out for a distant
public-house, remained there drinking till a late hour. There was a
bright moon overhead, but the evening was chilly and frosty; and the
boy, cold, tired, and half-overcome by sleep, after waiting on till past
midnight, shoved off the boat, and, making his way to the vessel, got
straightway into his hammock and fell asleep. Shortly after, the two men
came to the shore much the worse of liquor; and, failing to make
themselves heard by the boy, they stripped off their clothes, and chilly
as the night was, swam aboard. The master and his wife had been for
hours snug in their bed, when they were awakened by the screams of the
boy: the drunken men were unmercifully bastinading him with a rope's end
apiece. The master, hastily rising, had to interfere in his behalf, and
with the air of a man who knew that remonstrance in the circumstances
would be of little avail, he sent them both off to their hammocks.
Scarcely, however, had he again got into bed, when he was a second time
aroused by the cries of the boy, uttered on this occasion in the shrill
tones of agony and terror; and, promptly springing up, now followed by
his wife, he found the two sailors again belabouring the boy, and that
one of them, in his blind fury, had laid hold of a rope-end, armed, as
is common on shipboard, with an iron thimble or ring, and that every
blow produced a wound. The poor boy was streaming over with blood. The
master, in the extremity of his indignation, lost command of himself.
Rushing in, the two men were in a moment dashed against the deck;--they
seemed powerless in his hands as children; and had not his wife,
although very unfit at the time for mingling in a fray, run in and laid
hold of him,--a movement which calmed him at once,--it was her serious
impression that, unarmed as he was, he would have killed them both upon
the spot. There are, I believe, few things more formidable than the
unwonted anger of a good-natured man.

CHAPTER II.

"Three stormy nights and stormy days
We tossed upon the raging main;
An