has
served me through life, uncommon,--`Keep your weather-eye open and your
tongue housed 'xcept when you've got occasion to use it.' If that
fellow'd use his eyes more and his tongue less he'd see your father
comin' down the road there, right before the wind; with his old sister
in tow."

"How I wish he would have let me go with him!" muttered Fred to himself
sorrowfully.

"No chance now, I'm a-feared," remarked his companion. "The gov'nor's
as stiff as a nor'wester. Nothin' in the world can turn him once he's
made up his mind, but a regular sou'easter. Now, if you had been _my_
son, and yonder tight craft _my_ ship, I would have said, come, at once.
But your father knows best, lad, and you're a wise son to obey orders
cheerfully, without question. That's another o' my maxims: `Obey orders
an' ax no questions.'"

Frederick Ellice, senior, who now approached, whispering words of
consolation into the ear of his weeping sister, might, perhaps, have
just numbered fifty years. He was a fine, big, bold, hearty Englishman,
with a bald head, grizzled locks, a loud but not harsh voice, a rather
quick temper, and a kind, earnest, enthusiastic heart. Like Buzzby, he
had spent nearly all his life at sea, and had become so thoroughly
accustomed to walking on an unstable foundation, that he felt quite
uncomfortable on solid ground, and never remained more than a few months
at a time on shore. He was a man of good education and gentlemanly
manners, and had worked his way up in the merchant service, step by
step, until he obtained the command of a West India trader.

A few years previous to the period in which our tale opens, an event
occurred which altered the course of Captain Ellice's life, and for a
long period plunged him into the deepest affliction. This was the loss
of his wife at sea, under peculiarly distressing circumstances.

At the age of thirty Captain Ellice had married a pretty blue-eyed girl,
who resolutely refused to become a sailor's bride, unless she should be
permitted to accompany her husband to sea. This was without much
difficulty agreed to, and forthwith Alice Bremner became Mrs Ellice,
and went to sea. It was during her third voyage to the West Indies that
our hero, Fred, was born, and it was during this, and succeeding
voyages, that Buzzby became "all but a wet-nurse" to him.

Mrs Ellice was a loving, gentle, seriously-minded woman. She devoted
herself, heart and soul, to the training of h