It was an off day for the boat-builder. He was sitting, smoking his pipe, in the cottage porch, and reading a well-thumbed copy of “Gray’s Master Mariner.” He welcomed Archie with a secret delight, for he knew, by his little friend’s face, that he was brooding over some fancied injury, and it gave the boat-builder pleasure to talk his little friend out of his troubles.
“Well, Archie, what’s new in the wind,” said Ben, as he greeted the boy with a grasp of the hand. “It seems almost an age since I saw you, my boy.”
Little Archie sat down on a large stone bench in the porch, and told Ben his story. His mother had been vexed with him that morning. She had asked him to call at the rectory with a message for Doctor Hart, and he wanted to cut grass at the time, and objected. His mother did not scold him, oh, no, Ben, she sent Carrie, who willingly took the message, and his father had called him a name. Then, again, he had no toys like other boys. Some had a pony; he couldn’t have one. His father always answered his request for a pony with the reply that he couldn’t afford one just then and he would see about it some day. If Ben would only [!-- original location of illustration AND DISCUSSED LITTLE ARCHIE'S PURPOSED FLIGHT --] tell him how to go to sea he would certainly run away the next day.
“AND DISCUSSED LITTLE ARCHIE’S PURPOSED FLIGHT.”
Now, Ben knew the character of little Archie better, perhaps, than his own mother did; so, when he had given the little boy a draught of cool milk from the cottage kitchen, Ben lit his pipe afresh, and took down an old telescope, a relic of his sea-faring days, from the wall. The young man and the boy then strolled across a low, level tract of sand, to a grassy hillock, formed by the current of the Wyncombe. Here they sat down in the fast waning twilight, and discussed little Archie’s purposed flight.
“Yes, Archie,” said Ben, “a sailor’s life is well enough, if you don’t mind hard beds and harder words. If you can eat salty meat and mouldy bread it’s a fine life, Archie. There is no life I’d like better if they’d give you fresher water and not quite so many cruel blows. But, if you’ve made up your mind, Archie, and think you can go to bed nights in a rolling, tossing sea, with the wind howling and the rain pouring, and your mother thousands of miles away, looking at your little empty bed, I should think very seriously about it.” Archie looked thoughtful, as the gloom deepened on his face, and silence fell on the pair for a time.
ARCHIE THINKING OF BEN’S STORY.
Suddenly Ben spied a French frigate looming against the darkening sky and showed it to Archie through the telescope. He explained all the parts of the ship and dwelt long in his answers to the lad’s questions. He told little Archie how, early one stormy morning, he had been awakened from his bed in the cottage by the sound of guns away at sea, how he had descended to the beach with a lot of the villagers, to find the waves beating mercilessly over a great broken ship. He told how they had all stood, in the leaden morning, stricken with dread at the sight of the disaster they were all powerless to prevent; leaning hard against the wind, their breath and vision often failing as the sleet and spray rushed at them from the great mountain of foaming sea which kept breaking on the rocks in the cove. He told farther, how, before all their eyes, the vessel had given one great heave backwards and sank beneath the waves forever; how they could faintly hear the heart-rending screams of women and children above the storm as the great waste of waters covered the struggling vessel. He told Archie that, on the following evening, while he was mending a boat down the bay, he came across something lying amongst a mass of sea-weed, and on turning it over had found it to be the dead body of a sailor—a fair, curly-headed youth.