Humphrey Bold. Herbert Strang

triumphed over adverse fortune, and before he was thirty he became master and in a good measure owner of a frigate which he called The Benbow.

      It is said, I know not with what truth, that his fortunes date from an adventure that befell him in the year 1686. In the Benbow frigate he was attacked by a sallee rover, who boarded him, but was beaten off with the loss of thirteen men. Benbow (I tell the tale as I heard it) cut off their heads and threw them into pickle. When he landed at Cadiz, he brought them on shore in a sack, and on being challenged by the custom house officers as importing contraband goods, he threw them on the table with, "Gentlemen, if you like 'em, they are at your service."

      This saying so tickled the humor of the king of Spain that he recommended Benbow to our King James, and thus led to his promotion in our Royal Navy. The captain was now somewhat above forty years old, straight but slight in build, not ill looking, save that his nose was a trifle over big--a defect not uncommon, I have remarked, among great commanders.

      Well, as I said, we had arrived at Mistress Hind's door, and the captain was in a great rage at the havoc wrought by Vetch and his crew. He rapped on the door with the hilt of his sword, and out pops Mistress Nelly's head from the window above ('twas in a night-cap), and she screams:

      "Out upon you, you vagabones! You've done mischief enough for one night, drat you, and if ye be not gone inside of half a minute I'll empty the slops on ye, that I will."

      Benbow laughed.

      "The family spirit!" he says under his breath to Joe. "Speak to her; don't tell her I'm here."

      "Oh, Mistress Hind," says Joe in a mournful voice, "here's a welcome to a poor worn-out old mariner as you used to befriend."

      "Who in the world are ye?" she asks.

      "Who but Joe Punchard, ma'am, that went away for rolling a barrel, and has been a-rolling ever since."

      "Ay, now I know your voice. Back like a bad penny, are ye? Come and see me tomorrow; I'm abed now."

      "But I've brought a friend with me--another poor old mariner"--with a wink at Benbow--"who wants a night's lodging."

      "Can he pay?" asks Mistress Hind.

      "To be sure: his pockets are full of pieces of eight and other sound coin."

      "Then I'll come down to you; but ye must bide a minute or two till I throw a few things on, for I'd die rather than show myself to a mariner in my night rail."

      Benbow laughed again.

      "'Tis twenty years or more since I saw Nell," he said, "but I'd know her tongue in any company."

      And now the remembrance of my father's illness, which the subsequent excitements had driven from my mind, returned with a sudden force that made me take a hasty leave of the two travelers, though both asked me to wait and drink a dish of coffee with them. So I did not see the meeting of brother and sister, but learned from Joe next day the manner of it.

      Mistress Hind did not recognize the captain, never having seen him from a boy, until, sitting at table with a dish of coffee before him, and she standing over him, bidding him haste that she might return to bed--sitting thus, I say, he took up the dish and began to blow into it to cool it, as children do.

      "Why," says Mistress Hind, "tha blows it round and round to make little waves, just like my brother John."

      "Nelly!" says the captain, setting the dish down.

      "And there they were," said Joe in telling me the story, "in each other's arms, and when she'd done drying her eyes she says,

      "'John, and I needn't ha' minded about the night rail!'"

      It was nigh eleven o'clock when I got home--a very late hour in our parts, and Mistress Pennyquick was in a great to-do, imagining all kinds of evil that might have befallen me. Mr. Pinhorn had remained with my father a long time, she said; he was now asleep and was not to be disturbed. I was myself fairly tired out, and fell asleep the instant my head touched the pillow.

Chapter 5: I Lose My Best Friend.

       Table of Contents

      There was a crowded courthouse next day when Ralph Mytton and Cyrus Vetch were brought before the Mayor and charged with breach of the peace and malicious damage to the property of lieges. It was the first time that the Mohocks had been caught in the act, and their being well connected added a spice to the event.

      The two prisoners bore themselves very differently. Mytton, a nephew of the member of Parliament, assumed an air of bravado, smiled and winked at his friends in court, evidently trusting to his high connections to get him off lightly. Vetch, on the other hand, was sullen and morose, never lifting his eyes from the floor except when I was giving my evidence, and then he threw me a glance in which I read, as clearly as in a book, the threat of venomous hate. Both he and Mytton were very heavily fined, and the Mayor was good enough to compliment me on the part I had played.

      As we were leaving the court, a tipstaff came up to Joe Punchard, and formally arrested him as a runaway 'prentice; at the instance, I doubt not, of Vetch himself. But the matter ended in a triumph for Joe, for Captain Benbow accompanied him before the Mayor and declared that as a mariner in the King's navy he was immune from civil action. Whether the plea was good in law I know not. The Mayor did not know either, and the clerk, to judge by his countenance, was in an equal state of puzzlement. But Benbow was clearly not a man to be trifled with, and Joe had certainly had a part in bringing the Mohocks to book, and for one reason or another he was given the benefit of the doubt. When he left the court he was mightily cheered by a mob of 'prentices among the crowd, and would have accepted the invitations to drink pressed upon him but for the peremptory orders of his captain, who was no wine bibber himself, being therein unlike many of the navy men of his time.

      The fines levied on Mytton and Vetch were the least part of their punishment. The incident of the dust bin brought on them open ridicule; they became the laughingstock of Shrewsbury. The school wag, who afterwards became famous for his elegant Greek verses at Cambridge, pilloried them in a lampoon which the whole town got by heart, and for days afterwards they could not show their faces without being greeted by some lines from it by every small boy who thought himself beyond their reach. It began, I remember:

      Come list me sing a famous battle,

      A dustbin and a watchman's rattle;

      The hero he was nominate Cyrus,

      The scene was Shrewsbury, not Epirus.

      The rhymester introduced all the characters; for instance:

      Another who the dust has bitten

      Was a brawny putt by name Ralph Mytton;

      And Richard Cludde, a Cambridge lubber,

      He ran away home to his mam to blubber;

      and so the doggerel went on, chronicling the details (more or less imaginary) of the fight, the entrance of Mr. Benbow and Punchard on the scene:

      And Nelly Hind's bashed portal closes

      On bandy legs and Roman noses;

      and ending thus:

      Carmen concludo sine mora:"Intus si recte ne labora,"

      which being the school motto (dragged in by the hair of the head, so to speak), pleased Mr. Lloyd, the master, mightily.

      The rage of the persons chiefly concerned knew no bounds, and this good came of it, that the Mohocks troubled Shrewsbury streets no more.

      Captain Benbow, and with him Joe Punchard, stayed but a few days in the town. They had come on a flying visit in an interval of the war against the French on the high seas, and very proud we were that the captain, one of ourselves, was winning himself a name for prowess and gallantry in his country's service.

      Before he departed, however, I got from Joe