afloat that
displayed inimical colours, if it offered an equal chance of fight.

And this for more than a year, until the privateer, much battered, but
safe, despite her vicissitudes made Halifax for refitting. Here, at
the first suitable port she had touched, Adrian claimed and obtained
his release from obligations which made his life almost unendurable.

Then ensued a period of the most absolute penury; unpopular with most
of his messmates for his melancholy taciturnity, despised by the more
brutal as one who had as little stomach for a carouse as for a bloody
fight, he left the ship without receiving, or even thinking of his
share of prize-money. And he had to support existence with such mean
mechanical employment as came in his way, till an opportunity was
offered of engaging himself as seaman, again from sheer necessity, on
a homeward-bound merchantman--an opportunity which he seized, if not
eagerly, for there was no eagerness left in him, yet under the
pressure of purpose.

Next the long, slowly plodding, toilsome, seemingly eternal course
across the ocean.

But even a convoy, restricted to the speed of its slowest member, if
it escape capture or natural destruction, must meet the opposite shore
at length, and the last year of the century had lapsed in the even
race of time when, after many dreary weeks, on the first of January
1801, the long low lines of sandhills on the Lancastrian coast loomed
in sight. The escort drew away, swiftly southwards, as if in joyful
relief from the tedious task, leaving the convoy to enter the Mersey,
safe and sound.

That evening Adrian, the rough-looking and taciturn sailor, set foot,
for a short while, on his native land, after six years of an exile
which had made of him at five and twenty a prematurely aged and
hopelessly disillusioned man.

And Sir Adrian, as he mused, wrapped in the honoured fur cloak, with
eyes half closed, by his sympathetic fire, recalled how little of joy
this return had had for him. It was the goal he had striven to reach,
and he had reached it, that was all; nay, he recalled how, when at
hand, he had almost dreaded the actual arrival home, dreaded, with the
infinite heart-sickness of sorrow, the emotions of the family welcome
to one restored from such perils by flood and field--if not indeed
already mourned for and forgotten--little wotting how far that return
to Pulwick, that seemed near and certain, was still away in the dim
future of life.

Y