His habit of quiet thought and silent musing saved him a great deal now, for he was soon declared to be a poor milksop by those who sought his company at first, and he was left to himself, while the older thieves instructed the younger ones how to carry on fresh robberies when they were released.
[CHAPTER IV.]
ENGLISH SLAVES.
LIMEHOUSE HOLE in the last century was a place of some importance, for from this port wherries for Tilbury, Gravesend, and other places started with goods and passengers, to meet the larger vessels bound for distant shores.
A few weeks after the death of Eric's master, a party of weary, woe-begone travellers arrived at Limehouse Hole, under the charge of several gaolers, for they were all prisoners under sentence of transportation to His Majesty's plantations of America. Here they would be sold as slaves to the settlers—Englishmen, like themselves, who had gone out earlier from the mother country and settled there as farmers or traders, each growing richer and more independent every year.
But in this colony, where all were masters, there was one great and ever-growing want among them—servants, or slaves to do the harder and more menial work.
The native Indians were too wild and independent to be coaxed or driven into serving the conquerors of their land, and so the mother country found it cheap and convenient to send out every spring a few shiploads of thieves and beggars to be sold as slaves to the colonists; and this was a contingent from country gaols of those doomed to be sent out to America.
There were no very desperate characters among them, but a weary-looking, patient crowd of men and women, boys and girls, and among them our friend Eric, who had been condemned by the bench of justices to transportation as a beggar, that Summerleigh might not be troubled by him again.
His clothes were a little more ragged and dirty than when he was stable boy at The Magpie, but otherwise he was not much altered by his stay in prison, and he neither looked stupid nor vicious, as many of his companions did.
As they slowly passed along the landing stage on to the deck of the wherry, Eric noticed that a middle-aged woman stood near and looked hard at each as they passed. Something in her appearance and manner reminded him strangely of his mother, and he looked straight into the clear grey eyes as he passed; and then he hoped that she was going with them on their voyage, though why he should wish for this, he could not understand, for she did not look at all the kind of woman who would be likely to go either as prisoner or warder. But still, when he and his companions were driven to the other end of the vessel, he contrived to keep his eye upon her, and when at last the boat pushed oft, and he saw she had not returned to the shore, he felt as glad as though some good fortune had come to him.