“Good-bye, lass,” he whispered, as he drew the back of his hand across his eyes.
“Goo—goo—good-bye,” she said, in an agony of sobbing.
“You’ll always think o’ me, Poll?”
“Aw—aw—always,” she cried, shaken with emotion.
“An’ you’ll always be true to me?”
“Aw—aw—always,” she moaned.
“Kiss me, lass.”
Their lips met in a fervent salute. Then he was led away to his ship by Joey Copper, his best man; and she, in a half fainting, half hysterical state, was conducted back to her apartments by her faithful female companion.
It was a splendid morning in the leafy month of August—for Samuel Taylor Coleridge to the contrary, I cannot conceive why June should be held to form a monopoly of leafiness—and Billy Bunting of the Avalanche was proceeding along Lantern Lane, close to the Docks, when he beheld a female in distress. A hulking tramp with designs upon her purse, had compelled the lady to stop, and she was crying in vain to the great brick wall on either side, to help her. To “bear down upon” them, to call upon the villain to “belay there;” to knock him senseless in the roadway, and to offer his assistance to beauty in distress—to do all this, was, as is well-known to those conversant with the literature of the Rolling Deep—the work of a moment.
Billy loved a pretty face, and it was a pretty-one, of that plump and red kind so admired by sailors, which through tears looked up at Billy now. Giving the prostrate form of the tramp a kick, he gallantly offered his arm to the maiden, saying,—