The book fell open at the fly-leaf. On it three names were written, each in a different hand.
Horatio Nelson, Christopher Caryll, William Harding.
A bracket bound the three, and opposite the bracket, in the same hand as the first name, the words,
England and Duty.
The date was a week before St. Vincent.
The fly-leaf turned. On the back of it, in the great vague hand of a peasant-woman, rheumatic-ridden,
bili from mother
Xmas 1755
be a good boy.
Kit read the inscription with full throat. In his chest, awaiting him at the Bridge at Newhaven, there was such another book, with such another inscription, from such another mother—given him the night before his setting out on his life's voyage, she sitting on his bed with rather a rainy smile.
The old man had left him that little sea-worn book with his last breath; but he could not take it, perhaps the last gift from mother to son. It had seen the old man through his life; in it were to be found the Fighting Instructions which had led him on through fifty years of battle to the last great Victory; in death the two should not be divided.
He laid the book on the old man's breast, and his sword beside him, as he remembered his mother had done when Uncle Jacko Gordon died.