"For where is the cutter bound?" I asked.
"Yarmouth Roads."
"Yarmouth?"
"Yes. Some of the North Sea fleet are there in want of hands. You'll soon be turned over to a ship, and in a few weeks may be off the Texel watching the lubberly Dutch."
"Oh, my God! oh, my mother!" I exclaimed.
"What, you have a mother, have you? Well, I had a mother too, once," said the marine thoughtfully. "Now, tell me how you came here, my little man?"
I related my whole story, to which he listened attentively, though I gave it at considerable length. The honest marine seemed much struck with the lawless manner in which I had been treated, and said "it was a d—ned shame that the son of any man who had borne the king's commission should be put upon thus by a canting thief of a lawyer." He added, that he was sorry for me; gave me some more flip, said he would look after me, and that if I wanted "anything at any time, to pass the word forward for Jack Joyce the marine." He then turned away, for the relief approached at that moment with a new sentinel.
I had imbibed a portion of this good fellow's flip in time, having been so long without food, that I was quite faint; and amid all my woes, my interior was beginning to cry (as honest Sancho phrases it) "cupboard," in spite of me. Thus, the effect of the hot flip, which was well mixed with a portion of the purser's rum, was to set me into a profound slumber; and, oblivious of all about me—in spite of the creaking of guns, timbers, and bulk-heads, the grating of blocks and cordage, as the cutter rolled more and more on approaching the river's mouth, I slept heavily on the hard deck—yet not so heavily as to prevent dreams and visions of the happy home from which I had been reft thronging thick and fast upon me.
I heard the voices of my mother and of Lotty. I heard in fancy the sabbath-bell of our little village church, tolling slowly and solemnly in its old and mossgrown spire, echoing along the wooded vale and over the hills of purple heath and yellow broom, as it called to worship those whose hearts (unlike those of the full-fed pharisees and pampered parvenus of the city) were earnest, prayerful and humble, like those of their sires of old, who put their broadswords to the grindstone, and when kings and prelates oppressed them, forsook all and went to the mountain side, to watch and pray and fight, and in the end to conquer!
In my sleep, the sound of this bell, which was so much associated with my home, came to my dreaming ear many times, with the murmur of the mountain bee, and the crispy rustle of the old oaks that shaded my widowed mother's cottage—the altar of my hopes and heart, which I never more might see!