A Chapter of Adventures

WAITING FOR HELP.

BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY

George Alfred Henty was born near Cambridge in 1832, and educated at Westminster School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He volunteered for service in the Crimean War, and after some varied experiences adopted a journalistic career. He served as war correspondent of the Standard during the Austro-Italian campaign of 1866, and was afterwards a correspondent in the Abyssinian War, the Franco-German War, the Ashanti War, &c. His first book for boys was published in 1868, and was followed by a long and very successful series, including The Young Franc-Tireurs (1872), In Times of Peril (1881), Under Drake's Flag (1883), With Clive in India (1884), The Lion of the North (1886), Orange and Green (1888), The Lion of St. Mark (1889), By Pike and Dyke (1890), By Right of Conquest (1891), With Moore at Corunna (1898), With Kitchener in the Soudan (1903), and With the Allies to Pekin (1904). He died in 1902.


Of the tens of thousands of excursionists who every summer travel down by rail to Southend, there are few indeed who stop at Leigh, or who, once at Southend, take the trouble to walk three miles along the shore to the fishing village. It may be doubted, indeed, whether along the whole stretch of coastline from Plymouth to Yarmouth there is a village that has been so completely overlooked by the world. Other places, without a tithe of its beauty of position, or the attraction afforded by its unrivalled view over the Thames, from Gravesend to Warden Point, ever alive with ships passing up and down, have grown from fishing hamlets to fashionable watering-places; while Leigh remains, or at any rate remained at the time this story opens, ten years ago, as unchanged and unaltered as if, instead of being but an hour's run from London, it lay far north in Scotland.
Its hill rises steeply behind it; there is room only for the street between the railway and the wharves, and for a single row of houses between the line and the foot of the hill. To get into Leigh from the country round it is necessary to descend by a steep road that winds down from the church at the top of the hill; to get out again you must go by the same way. The population is composed solely of fishermen, their families, and the shopkeepers who supply their necessities. The men who stand in groups in the street and on the wharf are all clad in blue guernseys or duck smocks and trousers of pilot cloth or canvas. Broad-built sturdy men are they, for in point of physique there are few fishermen round the coast who can compare with those of Leigh.