Now Fred Arundel's father had been drowned when the boy was far too young to know the meaning of the sacred word "parent," while his mother had been taken away quite in his babyhood. But he had come to love and respect his foster-parents very much indeed. They were all in all to him. Fred was a good-natured lad, and there was nothing he would not have done to give the kindly old couple an hour's happiness.
Well, but for them he might have been running about in rags and wretchedness a "mitherless bairn,"
"When a' other bairnies are hushed to their hame,
By auntie, or cousin, or freckled grand-dame,
Who stands lost and lonely, wi' nobody carin'?
'Tis the poor doited laddie—the mitherless bairn,
"The mitherless bairn gangs to his lone bed,
Nane covers his cauld back, or haps his bare head;
His wee hackit heelies are hard as the iron,
And litheless the lair o' the mitherless bairn."
But Fred could not have been called "a mitherless bairn." And indeed if you were to have asked the lad confidentially he would have told you he was not a "bairn" in any sense of the word, but almost a man.
"Daddy Pop is old," thought Fred, "but he may live for twenty years and more yet, and so may Mammy too. Twenty years, what a long time! Why I shall be getting old myself in that time. Now although Daddy had some money in the bank before he went away on his long wanderings, and found when he came back that it had grown into a heap more; and although he had enough to build this cottage, and a fine fishing-boat also, still I know he isn't rich. His bed is not a very soft one, he doesn't live so well as I would like him to; he says he can't afford an easy chair, and that his Sunday coat is good enough. Well, if I had money, Daddy would have such a lot of comforts, and so would Mammy Mop. Why shouldn't Mammy have a silk dress as well as farmer Grigg's wife? She shall have it.
"Why shouldn't Daddy have an easy chair and a better pair of specs, and an easier seat in the cave among the rocks in which he writes his beautiful poetry? My Daddy shall be comfortable when I am older. But what shall I be? I can't be a fisher lad. Oh, no! I must travel and see the world, and—but, dear me! common sailors don't get rich, and Sandie Davis told me, after he came back from being all round and round the world, that often and often he was not allowed to put a foot on shore even in some of the prettiest places on the face of the earth. Sandie told me this because he likes me. Sandie wouldn't tell everybody, I'm sure of that. It wasn't for the half crown I lent Sandie that he likes me. Oh, no!
"But what does Sandie do? He comes home wearing his best blue clothes, and a dandy tie, and silver rings and things, and to hear him talk anybody would think he had been first officer of a ship. He smokes and takes beer—not that he pays for it, except by the stories—yarns he calls them—that he tells those who treat him. No, poor Sandie never has a penny to bless himself with after he has been two weeks at home. That isn't the kind of sailor I'm going to be, if ever I'm a sailor at all. Sandie's mother has a lot of 'curios,' as he calls them—some wonderful Japanese boxes, bottles of eau de Cologne, a funny-looking tea-caddy made out of a nut, an ostrich's egg, a savage's spear, and an old bow and arrow; but nothing she can eat or wear. She can't even eat the ostrich's egg, and funny she'd look going about with that dirty old bow and arrow.
"He's not a bad fellow, though he boasts and brags, and talks through his nose, and says words I never heard before, and don't wish to hear again, for sailors like Sandie would make me sick of the sea.
"No, I'll be something—something. I'm going to study and work to begin with, and then——"