"That's just what your father said; and he went to his death."
And my mother, as she says this, puts her apron over her head and began to cry again. I'd more than half a mind to give way; but you know what young chaps are. The thought of what the girls of the place would say about my being afraid to go was too much for me.
At last, when mother saw I was bent on going, she got up and said:
"Well, Will, if my prayers can't keep you back, will you do something else I ask you?"
"I will, mother," said I—"anything but stay back."
She went off without a word into her bedroom, and she came back with something in her arms.
"Look here, Will, I made this for your father, and he wouldn't have it; now I ask you to take it, and put it on if a storm comes on. You see, you can put it on under your dreadnaught coat, and no one will be any the wiser."
The thing she brought in was two flat Dutch spirit-bottles, sewn between two pieces of canvas. It had got strings sewed on for tying round the body, and put on as she did to show me how, one bottle each side of the chest, it lay pretty flat.
"Now, Will, these bottles will keep you up for hours. A gentleman who was staying in the village before you was born was talking about wrecks, and he said that a couple of empty bottles, well corked, would keep up a fair swimmer for hours. So I made it; but no words could get your father to try it, though he was willing enough to say that it would probably keep him afloat. You'll try it, won't you, Will?"
I didn't much like taking it, but I thought there wasn't much chance of a storm, and that if I put it under my coat and hid it away down in the forecastle, no one would see it; and so to please her I said I'd take it, and that if a bad storm came on I would slip it on.