Next morning I accordingly set off for Hampshire to try, if possible, to find my father's old home. What sort of a place it would turn out to be I had not the very remotest idea.
Leaving the train at Lyndhurst Road—for the village I was in search of was situated in the heart of the New Forest—I hired a ramshackle conveyance from the nearest innkeeper and started off for it. The man who drove me had lived in the neighbourhood, so he found early occasion to inform me, all his seventy odd years, and it struck him as a humorous circumstance that he had never in his life been even as far as Southampton, a matter of only ten minutes by rail.
We had travelled a matter of two miles when it struck me to ask my charioteer about the place to which we were proceeding. It was within the bounds of possibility, I thought, that he might once have known my father. I determined to try him. So waiting till we had passed a load of hay coming along the lane, I put the question to him.
To my surprise, he had no sooner heard the name than he became as excited as it was possible for him to be.
"Hatteras!" he cried. "Be ye a Hatteras? Well, well, now, dearie me, who'd ha' thought it!"
"Do you know the name so well, then?"
"Ay! ay! I know the name well enough; who doesn't in these parts? There was the old Squire and Lady Margaret when first I remember. Then Squire Jasper and his son, the captain, as was killed in the mutiny in foreign parts—and Master James——"
"James—that was my father's name. James Dymoke Hatteras."
"You Master James' son—you don't say! Well! well! Now to think of that too! Him that ran away from home after words with the Squire, and went to foreign parts. Who'd have thought it! Sir William will be right down glad to see ye, I'll be bound."
"Sir William, and who's Sir William?"