The Englishman had hardly voice to reply; but, recollecting himself, he said, “I’m afraid, Captain Fish, that we shall be sadly in your way for dealing with those whales we saw you secure yesterday.”
“Not much yew wunt,” was the unexpected reply. “We hed t’ make eour ch’ice mighty sudden between them fish ’n’ yew, ’n’, of course, though we’re noways extravagant, they hed t’ go.”
The simple nobility of that homely man, in thus for self and crew passing over the loss of from eight to ten thousand dollars at the first call from his kind, was almost too much for Captain James, who answered unsteadily—
“If I have any voice in the matter, there will be no possibility of the men, who dared the terrors of fire and sea to save me and my charges, being heavily fined for their humanity.”
“Oh, thet’s all right,” said Captain Silas Fish.
THE OLD HOUSE ON THE HILL
CHAPTER I
There is something in the stress and struggle of tumultuous life in a vast city like London that to me is almost unbearable. Accustomed from a very early age to the illimitable peace of the ocean, to the untainted air of its changeless circle of waves and roofless dome of sky, I have never been able to endure satisfactorily the unceasing roar of traffic in crowded streets, the relentless rush of mankind in the race for life which is the normal condition of our great centres of civilization. Yet, for many years, being condemned by circumstances to abide in the midst of urban strife and noise without a break from one weary year to another, I lived to mourn departed peace, and feed my longing for it on memory alone, without a hope that its enjoyments would ever again be mine. Then came unexpected relief, an opportunity to visit a secluded corner of Wiltshire, that inland division of England which is richer, perhaps, in memorials of our wonderful history than any other part of these little islands, crowded as they are with reminiscences of bygone glorious days.
I took up my quarters in a hamlet on the banks of the Wylye, a delightful little river, taking its rise near the Somersetshire border, and wandering with innumerable windings through the heart of Wiltshire, associating itself with the Bourne and the Nadder, until at Salisbury it is lost in that most puzzling of all streams, the Avon. I said puzzling, for I believe there are but a handful of people out of the great host to whom the Avon is one of the best-known streams in the world from its associations, who know that there is one Avon feeding the Severn near Tewkesbury, which is Shakespeare’s Avon; there is another, upon which Bristol has founded her prosperity, and there is yet another, the Avon of my first mention, which, accumulated from numberless rivulets in the Vale of Pewsey, floweth through Salisbury, and loses itself finally in the waters of the English Channel at Christchurch in Hampshire. But I must ask forgiveness for allowing the wily Avon to lure me away thus far.