“How old is he now?”
“Fifteen years an’ ten months,” said father, after careful consideration and much counting on his fingers. “He’ll be sixteen next April, on ‘Primrose Day,’ as they call it.”
“Another Tom Bowling, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” said father. “He’s ‘young Tom,’ an’ I’m the ‘old un’ now!”
“Humph! He’s a fine grown young chip for his age. What are you going to make of him? He ought to be a sailor and serving the Queen by now, like his father before him!”
Father ‘hummed’ and ‘hawed,’ not knowing what to answer to this; while I burned all over with joy at having so potent an advocate coming to my aid in this unexpected way.
Captain Mordaunt saw this: though anybody could have seen it from one glance at my face; for if I grinned ‘like a Cheshire cat eating green cheese’ on ordinary occasions, as father used to say, why, I must have looked now as if I had bolted all the cheese in one lump, and it had stuck in my throat, keeping my mouth open on the stretch!
So, noticing this, father’s old friend put the question to me point-blank.
“I think, youngster, you’ve pretty well made up your mind already in the matter, if I’m not very much mistaken,” said he to me, as I unshipped my oar and stood up in the bow of the wherry, ready to fend her off from the pontoon as we ran up alongside, right under the stern of one of the Ryde steamers that was just backing out from the railway pier above us. “You’d like to go to sea, young Tom, I’m sure, eh?”
“There’s nothing I should like better, sir,” I answered glibly enough, catching hold of one of the piles of the pier with my boathook and bringing up the wherry easily to the landing-stage. “I only wish you’d coax my father, sir, to let me be a sailor!”