"I see a wherry approaching from up-river. I had best be gone. Good luck to you, lad, and write as occasion serves."
He went over the side with his lips pursed as if to whistle and a look of doleful pleasure on his face. Him, too, as it happened, I was never to see again. In fact, I wonder whether I should not have leaped over the vessel's side at that moment had I realized how complete was to be the severance of my life from all that I had known before.
But I did not know. I walked away from the rail with a light heart, inspired by Master Juggins' parting words and the vision he had called up before my eyes. I cast only a casual glance at the approaching wherry, which was still too far for me to observe whom she contained.
By the cabin entrance under the poop I found the seaman who had collected my scanty baggage, and he escorted me down the shallow stairs into a dark passage, which led to the main cabin, a room at the stern which ran the width of the ship and was lighted by three windows. It was mainly occupied by a table and four benches clamped to the deck. Off the passage itself, opened four doors, two on either side.
"Where do you berth?" the seaman asked me, pausing at the foot of the ladder-stairs.
"With the second mate."
He opened the first door on the right-hand, or starboard, side, revealing a space so tiny that I marveled how two men could force themselves into it at once. It was so low that I could not stand upright, so cramped that there was room only for one person outside the two short, shallow bunks which occupied two-thirds of its area.
"Do all the passengers lodge aft here?" I asked him carelessly as he disposed of my trappings.
"All save the negro; he is to sleep in the galley behind the companionway."
When he had gone I curled up in the lower bunk, which the second mate obviously had surrendered to me, and spent the remainder of the day in dozing and finishing off the shore-food Granny Juggins had prepared for my hours of seclusion. I listened long for the other passengers, but they kept the deck, probably watching the work of getting under way and taking a last look at the shores of England—as I should have liked to do myself.