“A year passed—the stranger was forgotten; and our lonely villagers had no events to excite them beyond every-day occupations. They were removed from the cares and anxieties of busier life; but, as events proved, they were not secure from its common calamities.
“Typhus fever broke out in a neighbouring sea-port; the crew of a fishing-boat caught the infection, and introduced the terrible disease into our crowded hamlet. Numbers became its victims; and in the same week both my parents died, and I was left upon the world without any natural protector.
“On the evening of my father’s funeral I was sent for to the public-house, and there, to my surprise, I found the stranger who had been my father’s guest a year before. The sick lieutenant had been restored to health, and was about to resume his professional duties. He had been appointed to a ship; but before he left the kingdom, he made our village his line of route, that he might have an opportunity of thanking my parents once more for past kindnesses. He found those who succoured him in the grave,—their only child an orphan, and without a relative who could afford him protection or a home.
“A tear trickled down the cheek of the rough old sailor, as he listened to the story of my destitution.
“‘And has he no friends, poor boy?’ inquired the lieutenant.
“‘None,’ said the landlord, in reply. ‘I believe he has not one relative who could give him a second meal, nor a friend who—”
“‘False, by Heaven!’ exclaimed the tar. ‘He has a friend who will divide his last guinea with him; and from this hour, I am the orphan’s father!’
“I must be brief. Lieutenant Oakley stopped that evening in the village, and when he left it next morning I was his companion. He was a rough, but warm-hearted sailor of the old school; and, after a year’s probation, he succeeded in having me rated on the books of a line-of-battle ship as midshipman. A few months afterwards, my protector was killed in a boat affair upon the coast of Spain—once more I was left upon the world—and at fifteen years of age I had to fight with fortune as I could.
“Rawlings, you know now the story of my early life. Without a being to guide my boyhood, I was flung on the wide ocean of existence. The sword has been my talisman, and I have hewn my own road to fame. My very destitution placed me in fortune’s track. I had no gentle ties to bind me to the world: if I died, none would shed a tear: what, then, was life to me?—A nothing! I staked it with a gambler’s recklessness, and I have earned for myself the name that birth denied me.”
A noise on deck was heard. “Stay here,” he said; “I will return immediately.” After a few minutes, Captain O’Brien re-entered the cabin, his face beaming with delight, and its expression betokening the confidence of anticipated victory.