Peter Trawl; Or, The Adventures of a Whaler - William Henry Giles Kingston

“I wish the lads had shipped on board a peaceable merchantman,” he observed when I told him, “but I can’t pretend to dictate to them. I am glad thou hast been better directed, Peter.”

Jack and Jim came to see us before the ship went out of harbour. Jack said he knew that he must work for his living, and that he would rather serve aboard a man-o’-war than do anything else.

“I’ll look after him as I used to do you, Peter,” said Jim. “And I hope some day we’ll come back with our pockets full of gold, and maybe bear up for wherever you’ve dropped your anchor.”

A few days after this a letter came from Mr Troil, inviting Mary, Jack, and me to Shetland. Mary was very unwilling to leave her kind friends, but Mr Gray said that it would be to our advantage, and advised Mary and me to go.

He was right, for when we arrived Mr Troil received us as relatives. Mary became like a second daughter to him. I assisted in managing his property, and in the course of a few years Maggie, to whom he left everything he possessed, became my wife, while Mary married the owner of a neighbouring estate.

Some few years after a small coaster came into the Voe. I went down to see what she had on board. A sailor-looking man, with a wooden leg, and a woman, stepped ashore.

“That’s him—that’s him!” I heard them exclaim, and in a moment I was shaking hands with Jim and Nancy, who had become his wife. He had got his discharge, and had come, he said, to settle near me. I several times heard from my brother Jack, who, after serving as bo’sun on board a line-of-battle ship, retired from the service with a pension, and joined our family circle in Shetland, where he married, and declared that he was too happy ever to go to sea again.

The End.