In this while it had come slowly upon me, until at last it was a great conviction, that I must be neither a water-thief, nor policeman, nor a doctor driving his carriage, nor a preacher in a carpeted pulpit, but a seaman and sometime a ship-captain like Uncle Benson, which idea became a hunger and thirst. But when I told my father of it, he looked at me queerly, and told me to mind my books. And I noticed that he would talk no more of sea matters when I was near, and would send me away from the inn parlour to go up to the sewing-room. So, whenever I pressed him to say I was to be a sailor, he would put it aside with a look on his face that puzzled me, for it was not only sadness, but fear. The sweat would come on his forehead and his hand shake. I think I was little comfort to anyone in those days, knocking about the streets and wharves, idle, sullen, and restless, wronging those in my thoughts who loved me most.
That old song I took to humming to myself—
“Benson and Cree,
One at home and one at sea,”
till I had fairly got it changed, so that it ran—
“Bennie Ben Cree,
Come away to the sea,”
and the lilt of the tune never failed to put a beating in my ears and a burning in my eyes, and fill my head with foolish fancies. I would sing it to Harrier in his shop, and Harrier would say, “Aye, aye, sonny! Them's new words.”
So it was come the year '61; and late in the month of May the Saratoga lay in the slip being fitted out for government use to blockade Southern ports, and sometime, then or later, was towed across to the navy yard. She was sold to the service, with the option of repurchase if not destroyed, and Uncle Benson was enlisted to command her, and looked a fit proper man in his uniform, which excited me almost beyond endurance.
Now I am come to a scene in the little inn parlour behind the public room. It was my father's office, and in a manner his room of state. You should see in mind a square room with pleasant curtains and a gay carpet on the floor, a round stove with no fire in it at this time; there are six or eight stout chairs of varied shape, about the number of my father's cronies, who came evenings to pack themselves in, and make the air white with smoke and salty with old sea memories. In the corner is a snug desk, and about the walls models of “Benson & Cree's” five ships; portraits of the family, and a painting of an unlikely looking coast; on one side shelves with a few books, but mainly pink and white shells, and stuffed fishes.