My mother! the thought of her—of home, and where I was, filled me with paroxysms of grief, and rage, and agony; for in boyhood we feel, I think, with greater acuteness than in after years.
After a time, and as the evening came on, amid the horrors of the place, I sat in a state of bewilderment amounting almost to torpor. I doubted the reality of my senses, and kept repeating,—
"It is a dream—I am asleep. When awake, I shall find myself in bed at home."
From this dream I was, however, soon awakened to a painful sense of reality by a kick or a blow from some of the wretches about me, as they quarrelled and fought with each other.
As night descended a deeper despair came over me; yet I prayed, not to God, but, poor boy that I was, to my mother.
I thought of her alone now, and a thousand acts of kindness and of her maternal love—of my neglect and selfishness—came out of the chaos of my mind, and stood vividly and upbraidingly before me. Even Amy and Lotty were forgotten, or merged in the single idea of her—her desolation, her age, and sorrow, and a terror lest I should never see her more. Could I foresee the future!
When the boom of the evening gun from the guardship, pealing with a thousand reverberations over the calm flow of the beautiful river, announced that the sun had gone down beyond the western hills, a hubbub of voices on deck also informed us that the crew of the pressing tender were casting loose the canvas, heaving short on the anchor, and preparing for sea.
As soon as her boats were hoisted in, and the tender was under weigh, the hatch was opened, and we were all ordered on deck from our stifling den, which a party of seamen proceeded at once to swab and deluge with buckets of water. The cutter was standing down the broad estuary of the Forth, but making long tacks, as the wind blew stiffly from the eastward.
I was now doomed to witness a scene which filled me with fresh terrors. A miserable and delicate-looking boy, who had been pressed—illegally kidnapped like myself—proving refractory, by order of Mr. Cranky (an officer of a species happily long since extinct), was tied up to the weather shrouds, and, while screaming piteously, was lashed on the bare back till he was covered, first, with livid bars, and then with clotted blood. Ere this he had fainted, but a bucket or two of salt water was dashed over him "to bring him to," and then he was carried below.
This exemplary exhibition rather tamed the tempers of the pressed men, who gazed blankly into each other's faces, and a few of them became completely sobered by it.