e have befallen you during
your adventurous life; but choose whatever one it may be most pleasant
for you to relate; and we shall promise to listen attentively, since
one and all of us know that it will be an easy thing to keep that
promise. And now, dear captain! grant us the favour we ask, and your
petitioners shall be for ever grateful."

Such a polite request could not be refused; and without hesitation I
declared my intention to gratify my young friends with a chapter from my
life. The chapter chosen was one which I thought would be most
interesting to them--as it gave some account of my own boy-life, and of
my first voyage to sea--which, from the odd circumstances under which it
was made, I have termed a "Voyage in the Dark."

Seating myself upon the pebbly beach, in full view of the bright sea,
and placing my auditory around me, I began.

CHAPTER TWO.

SAVED BY SWANS.

From my earliest days, I was fond of the water--instinctively so. Had I
been born a duck, or a water-dog, I could not have liked it better. My
father had been a seaman, and his father before him, and grandfather
too; so that perhaps I inherited the instinct. Whether or not, my
aquatic tastes were as strong as if the water had been my natural
element; and I have been told, though I do not myself remember it, that
when still but a mere child, it was with difficulty I could be kept out
of puddles and ponds. In fact, the first adventure of my life occurred
in a pond, and that I remember well. Though it was neither so strange
nor so terrible as many adventures that befell me afterwards, still it
was rather a curious one, and I shall give you it, as illustrating the
early _penchant_ I had for aquatic pursuits. I was but a very little
boy at the time, and the odd incident occurring, as it were, at the very
threshold of my life, seemed to foreshadow the destiny of my future
career--that I was to experience as in reality I have experienced, many
vicissitudes and adventures.

I have said I was but a very little boy at the time--just big enough to
go about, and just of that age when boys take to sailing paper-boats. I
knew how to construct these out of the leaf of an old book, or a piece
of a newspaper; and often had I sent them on voyages across the
duck-pond, which was my ocean. I may ay, I had got a step beyond the
mere paper-boats: with my six months' stock of pocket-money, which I had
saved for the purpose, I had succeeded