“Ye might as weel, I think,” responds Gardener Paul judgmatically. “Ye’re the born petrel; and for the matter of gardening, being my own and Adam’s trade, I’ve kenned for lang ye’ll no mair touch spade or mattock than handle coals of fire. So, as I was saying, ye might as weel sail ‘prentice with Dick; and when ye meet your brother William, gi’ him his father’s gude word. Ye’ll never have seen William, Jack, for he left hame before ye were born; and so it’ll be a braw fore-gathering between the twa of ye—being brothers that never met before.”
And after this fashion the fisher-boy, John Panl, afterward Admiral Paul Jones, is given his baptism of the sea.
CHAPTER II—IN THE BLACK TRADE
The sun is struggling through the dust-coated, cobwebbed windows, and lighting dimly yet sufficiently the dingy office of Shipowner Younger of Whitehaven. That substantial man is sitting at his desk, eyes fixed upon the bristle of upstanding masts which sprout, thick as forest pines on a hillside, from the harbor basin below. The face of Shipowner Younger has been given the seasoning of several years, since he went to Arbigland that squall-torn afternoon, to pick up a crew for Dick Bennison. Also, Shipowner Younger shines with a new expression of high yet retiring complacency. The expression is one awful and fascinating to the clerk, who sits at the far end of the room. Shipowner Younger has been elected to Parliament, and his awful complacency is that elevation’s visible sign. The knowledge of his master’s election offers the basis of much of the clerk’s awe, and that stipendary almost charms himself into the delusion that he sees a halo about the bald pate of Shipowner Younger.
The latter brings the spellbound clerk from his trance of fascination, by wheeling upon him.