There was an adventure forward, and the off chance of a fight: he brimmed at the thought of it. Without imagination, he knew no fear; with little experience of pain, he didn't much believe in it. They wouldn't catch him; they wouldn't hit him!
Before him knelt the Parson with low head, swathing his feet with strips of torn towel, absorbed as a surgeon, careful as a mother.
"Is that easy?—now how's that?—try your foot down! Another turn round the ankle?—Remember, it'll be rough going till you strike the grass."
At the loop-hole Nelson's old foretop-man watched and waited. A gleam smote his silver hair and prophetic forehead. Kit watched him wondering.
The old man, so tranquil amid the stir and whisper of death, affected the boy as One years ago had affected other seamen tempest-tossed.
His chattering heart hushed as a sparrow hushes in the quiet of a great cathedral.
Then the world rushed in on him with a shout.
Again that gust of laughter outside, that roaring chorus.
The Gap Gang were making merry.
The contrast revolted the lad.