“And a young gentleman he will still remain; for, you may depend on it, the captain intends to get him placed on the quarter-deck; and, though he himself has retired from the service, he has interest enough to get me and the lads appointed to some ship commanded by a friend of his own; and I flatter myself that, from the certificate I got from my last captain, he will have no difficulty about that.”
We had almost given up any expectations of ever meeting Harry’s friends. I own that I did not care very much about this, for once on the quarter-deck I felt sure he would make his own way; and though it might be of advantage to him to find them out, it was possible that it might be very much to the contrary.
I was one day going up the street of Ryde with Harry, when we saw a crowd of women and children and a few men and boys standing round the model of a full-rigged ship, and we heard a loud voice singing out—
“Cease, rude Boreas, stormy railer;
List, ye landsmen all, to me;
Messmates, hear a brother sailor
Sing the dangers of the sea.”
Then came the sound of a fiddle, and the singer continued his song to his own accompaniment.
“Let us stop and hear the old sailor,” said Harry, drawing me towards the crowd.
We found room just opposite where the man was standing. I then saw that he had a timber leg, and that the ship was placed on a stand with a lump of lead fixed to the end of a bent iron rod at the bottom, which made it rock backwards and forwards.
“Oh yes! oh yes! all you good people, lend a ear to poor Jack’s yarn,” he continued; “and you pretty girls with the blue eyes and rosy cheeks, and you with the dark ones, who does more harm with your blinkers, when you’ve the mind, among the hearts of young fellows than ever our ships gets from the guns of the Frenchmen. There aren’t many men in the navy of Old England who has seen queerer sights, or gone through more ups and downs in life than the timber-toed old tar who stands afore you, and who lost his leg in action aboard the Thunderer, seventy-four, when we took a Frenchman and hauled down his colours afore he knew where he was. There aren’t many either, I’ve a notion, who’ve been worse rewarded, or more kicked about by cruel fate, or you wouldn’t find him playing the fiddle and singing songs for your amusement.
Howsomdever, that’s neither here nor there, and I daresay you wish to hear the end of his stave, and so you shall when each on you has helped to load this here craft with such coppers or sixpences or shillings as you may chance to have in your pockets, and I daresay now a golden guinea wouldn’t sink her. Just look at her, always a-tossing up and down on the salt sea; that’s what we poor sailors have to go through all our lives. She’s a correct model of the Royal George, that famous ship I once served aboard when she carried the flag of the great Admiral Lord Hawke; and which now lies out there at Spithead fathoms deep below the briny ocean, with all her drownded crew of gallant fellows, no more to hear the tempest howling, or fight the battles of their king and country!”