I was so young, I understood well enough that he meant this
of his death, and I cried sadly; but he comforted me and told me, that
I must be his little executrix, and perform his last will, and bear
his last words to his mother and his sister, and to his cousin Jenny,
whom I should see in a short time; and he gave me his blessing, as
a father would bless his child, and he sent a last kiss by me to all
his female relations, and he made me promise that I would go and see
them when I got to England, and soon after this he died; but I was
in another part of the ship when he died, and I was not told it till
we got to shore, which was a few days after; but they kept telling me
that he was better and better, and that I should soon see him, but
that it disturbed him to talk with any one. Oh, what a grief it was,
when I learned that I had lost my old ship-mate, that had made an
irksome situation so bearable by his kind assiduities; and to think
that he was gone, and I could never repay him for his kindness!

When I had been a year and a half in England, the captain, who
had made another voyage to India and back, thinking that time had
alleviated a little the sorrow of Atkinson's relations, prevailed upon
my friends who had the care of me in England, to let him introduce me
to Atkinson's mother and sister. Jenny was no more; she had died in
the interval, and I never saw her. Grief for his death had brought on
a consumption, of which she lingered about a twelvemonth, and then
expired. But in the mother and the sisters of this excellent young
man, I have found the most valuable friends which I possess on this
side the great ocean. They received me from the captain as the little
_protegee_ of Atkinson, and from them I have learned passages of his
former life, and this in particular, that the illness of which he died
was brought on by a wound of which he never quite recovered, which he
got in the desperate attempt, when he was quite a boy, to defend his
captain against a superior force of the enemy which had boarded him,
and which, by his premature valour inspiriting the men, they finally
succeeded in repulsing. This was that Atkinson, who, from his
pale and feminine appearance, was called Betsy. This was he whose
womanly care of me got him the name of a woman, who, with more than
female attention, condescended to play the hand-maid to a little
unaccompanied orphan, that fortune had cast upon the care of a rough
sea captain, and his