OF MY UNCLE AND HIS OF HIS CONVERSATIONS WITH TWO MARINERS
I was rising four years old when my parents died, both within one week, of the small-pox; and the day of their funeral is the furthermost of my recollections. My nurse, having tied up the sleeves of my pinafore with black, held me with her in the great room down-stairs as the mourners assembled. Their solemn faces and whispered words, and the dreadful black garments, drove me into a state of terror, and I was not far from screaming among them when there entered a big man with a jolly red face, at whom the company rose and bowed very respectfully. The moment he was within the room his eye lit on me, and seeing at a glance how matters stood, he thrust one hand into his great pocket, and drew it forth full of sugar-plums, which he laid in my pinafore, and then bade the nurse take me away.
'Twas my uncle Stephen, said Nurse, and a kind good man. Certainly I liked him well enough, and when, two or three days thereafter, he set me before him on his saddle, and rode away humming the rhyme of "Banbury Cross," I laughed very joyously, never believing but that after I had seen the lady with the tinkling toes, Uncle Stephen would bring me home again, and that by that time my mother would have returned from heaven, whither they told me she had gone.
I did not see my childhood's home again for near thirty years.
My uncle took me to live with him, in his own house not a great way from Stafford. He was an elder brother of my father's, and till then had been a bachelor; but having now a small nephew to nourish and breed up, he did not delay to seek a wife, and wed a fine young woman of Burslem. She was very kind to me, and even when there were two boys of her own to engage her affections, her kindness did not alter. So I grew up in great happiness, having had few troubles, the greatest of them being, perhaps, those that beset my first steps to learning in Dame Johnson's little school. As for my subsequent search after knowledge on the benches of the Grammar School at Stafford, the less said the better: the master once declared, in Latin, that I was "only not a fool."
The light esteem in which the pedagogue held my intellects did not give my uncle any concern. He was bad at the books himself, saving in one kind I am to mention hereafter. He was a master potter, in a substantial way of business, and held in some repute among men of his trade. Indeed, it was the belief of many in our parts that he might have become as famous in the world as Mr. Wedgwood himself, had he not been afflicted with a hobby.
I will not follow the example of the ingenious Mr. Sterne, and write here a chapter upon hobby-horses; though I do believe I could say something on that subject, if not with his incomparable humour, yet with a certain truth of observation. Why is a man's hobby often at such variance with other parts of his character? Why did the late Mr. Selwyn, to wit, take the greatest pleasure in life in seeing men hanged, drawn, and quartered? Who that knew John Steer (I knew him well) only as he stood with knife and cleaver in his butcher's shop, would believe that 'twas his delight, after slaughtering his sheep and oxen, to solace his evenings with warbling on the German flute? My uncle's hobby was no less extraordinary. He was inland bred, and I do believe, until the year of his great adventure, had never gone above twenty miles from his native town; yet he had a wondrous passion for the sea and all that pertained to it. I am sure that he never saw the sea until he and I together looked upon it at Tilbury, and there, to be sure, the salt water is much qualified with fresh; yet, after business hours, he was for ever talking of it and reading about it and the doings of sailor men. He would pore for long hours upon the pages of the Sailor's Waggoner, and con by heart the rules and instructions of the Sailor's Vade Mecum. He was deeply learned in the Principal Navigations of Mr. Hakluyt; he could tell you all that befell George Cavendish in the Desire and Sir Richard Hawkins in the Dainty, and would hold me spell-bound as he recited with infinite gusto the stark doings of the Buccaneers. And when Mr. Cadell, the bookseller in the Strand in London, sent him the great volumes containing the discoveries of Commodore Byron, and those gallant captains Carteret, Wallis, and Cook in the southern hemisphere, the days were a weariness to him until he could light his candle and put on his spectacles and feast on those enthralling narratives. Many's the time, as I lay awake in my bed, have I heard my aunt Susan call down the stairs through the open door of her room, "Steve, Steve, when be a-coming to bed, man?" and his jolly voice rolling up, "Yes, my dear, I am near the end of the chapter"; and there he would sit, and finish the chapter, and begin another, and read on and on, until I might be stirred from a doze by the sound of him shuffling past in his stockings, and grumbling because there was but an inch of guttering candle left.
My uncle was a sturdy patriot, and took a great delight in knowing that the most of the navigators of those far-off seas were Englishmen. I remember how he fumed and fretted when his bookseller in London sent him the volume of Monsieur de Bougainville's voyage round the world. What had these French apes, he cried, to do with voyages of discovery? And when he read later, in Dr. Hawkesworth's book, of the trick which Monsieur de Bougainville played on Captain Wallis—how, meeting the captain on his homeward way, he sought with feigning to worm out of him the secrets of his expedition—my uncle smote the table with his great fist, and used such fiery language that my aunt turned pale and my little cousins began to blubber.
At this time I was in my seventeenth year, and had been for some months in my uncle's factory, learning the rudiments of his trade. 'Twas taken for granted that I should become a partner with him when I was of age, for the business was good enough to support both me and my elder cousin Thomas; while as for the younger, James, my aunt had set her heart on making a parson of him. But it was ordained that, in my case, things should fall out quite contrary to the intention, as you shall hear.
One fine Sunday we were walking home from church, my uncle and I, across the fields, as our practice was, when we saw that the last stile before we reached our road was occupied. A big fellow, clad in a dress that was strange to our part of the country, sat athwart the rail of the fence, with his feet on the upper step. Another man sprawled on the grass beside the fence, lying stretched on his back with his hands under his head, and a hat of black glazed straw tilted over his eyes. As we drew nearer, I saw that the man on the stile had a big fat face, his red cheeks so puffed out that his eyes were scarce visible, his mouth loose and watery, with an underhung chin, a thick fringe of black hair encircling it from ear to ear.