friends, and give t’other half to yer old mother to help her along till you come back from sea again—bless her old heart! On’y I wish when she kisses yer and says, ‘good-bye, and bless you, my dear boy!’ she wouldn’t cry quite all over yer. But as I was a-saying, Jack, here you’re going back quite comfy to join the Sairy Ann schooner, lad, with nothing to do but join your ship, when down upon you comes this here boy, tired and hungry, and crying as bad as your old mother, my lad. You didn’t want a boy, Jack, and now you’ve got him you don’t know what to do with him, nor who he is, nor where he’s going, nor where he comes from. Strikes me he don’t know himself. Take him aboard the Sairy Ann, my lad, and show him to the skipper. ‘Now, then,’ says you, ‘here’s a boy.’ ‘So I see,’ says the skipper. ‘Well, what’s to be done with him?’ says you, and he turns it over in his mind, and ’fore you know where you are he’s settled it all and told you what to do and where to put him.
“That’s the way to do it,” said Jack Jeens, with a low, soft chuckle. “Poor little bairn! The skipper has got a wife and little uns of his own, and understands these sort o’ things. Shouldn’t wonder if he finds a new father and mother for him.”
Jack’s messmates said nothing, for they never knew, though the rough sailor began to carry out his plan, going onward with the boy fast asleep upon his back, too much wearied out to heed where he was going or to think of the troubles which had befallen one so young. For his sleep grew deeper and deeper till the lights of Torquay came into sight round about the port at the bottom of the hill; and he did not stir when Jack, stopping short at the door of a shabby-looking little inn upon the Strand—a place much frequented by seamen—and the boy did not heed Jack Jeen’s voice when he cried, “What cheer?” to the landlady, and asked for a room and bed for the night with supper to be ready directly.
The simple supper was soon placed upon the table of the mean-looking room; but the boy could not eat.
“Tired out?” said the landlady, sourly.
“Ay, ay; that’s it,” said Jack. “Here, missus, I’ll carry him up and put him to bed.”
And this the rough fellow did, carrying his young companion as carefully as if he were afraid that he would break, and then without attempting to undress him, he laid him down, covered him up, and then went back to have his supper. After which, weary enough himself, and thinking about his work in the early morning, he looked out to where his schooner lay moored to a buoy with a light swinging high in the rigging, and then went up to his room.
The boy was faster than ever, and as Jack Jeens held a guttering tallow candle over the sleeper’s face, “Poor little chap,” he said, smiling. “Why, if I get tumbling into bed it’ll wake him up, and I won’t do that. Here, this’ll do.”
Jack took the candle out of the stick and put it out very untidily by turning it upside down till the flame was choked, and then threw himself down upon the floor by the bedside.
“Quite as soft—bit softer perhaps—than the schooner’s deck,” he muttered. “Good-night, little un. The skipper’ll make it all right for you in the morning, and—Heigh-ho-ha-hum! My word, I am jolly sleepy, and—”