h there to stop the roads. Keeping head-quarters at the
"Hooked Cod" now, and encouraging a butcher to set up again (who had
dropped all his money, in his hurry to get on), Geoffrey Mordacks began
to make way into the outer crust of Flamborough society. In a council of
the boats, upon a Sunday afternoon, every boat being garnished for
its rest upon the flat, and every master fisherman buttoned with a
flower--the last flowers of the year, and bearing ice-marks in their
eyes--a resolution had been passed that the inland man meant well, had
naught to do with Revenue, or Frenchmen either, or what was even worse,
any outside fishers, such as often-time came sneaking after fishing
grounds of Flamborough. Mother Tapsy stood credit for this strange man,
and he might be allowed to go where he was minded, and to take all the
help he liked to pay for.

Few men could have achieved such a triumph, without having married a
Flamborough lass, which must have been the crown of all human ambition,
if difficulty crowns it. Even to so great a man it was an added laurel,
and strengthened him much in his opinion of himself. In spite of all
disasters, he recovered faith in fortune, so many leading Flamborough
men began to touch their hats to him! And thus he set forth before a
bitter eastern gale, with the head of his seasoned charger bent toward
the melancholy cot at Bridlington.

Having granted a new life of slaughter to that continually insolvent
butcher, who exhibited the body of a sheep once more, with an eye to the
approach of Christmas, this universal factor made it a point of duty
to encourage him. In either saddle-bag he bore a seven-pound leg of
mutton--a credit to a sheep of that district then--and to show himself
no traitor to the staple of the place, he strapped upon his crupper, in
some oar-weed and old netting, a twenty-pound cod, who found it hard to
breathe his last when beginning to enjoy horse-exercise.

"There is a lot of mouths to fill," said Mr. Mordacks, with a sigh,
while his landlady squeezed a brown loaf of her baking into the nick
of his big sword-strap; "and you and I are capable of entering into the
condition of the widow and the fatherless."

"Hoonger is the waa of them, and victuals is the cure for it. Now mind
you coom home afore dark," cried the widow, to whom he had happened to
say, very sadly, that he was now a widower. "To my moind, a sight o'
more snaw is a-coomin'; and what mah sard or goon foight agai