Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/665

Rh of her pen at me. That action on her part calls to my mind as I look at her hand with the rings on it—Well! I won't! To be sure it will come in, in its own place. But it's always strange to me, noticing the quiet hand, and noticing it (as I have done, you know so many times) a fondling children and grandchildren asleep, to think that when blood and honor were up—there! I won't! not at present!—Scratch it out. She won't scratch it out, and quite honorable; because we have made an understanding that everything is to be taken down, and that nothing that is once taken down shall be scratched out. I have the great misfortune of not being able to read and write, and I am speaking my true and faithful account of these adventures, and my lady is writing it, word for word.

I say, there I was, a-leaning over the bulwarks of the sloop Christopher Columbus in the South American waters off the Musquito shore; a subject of his gracious majesty King George of England, and a private in the Royal Marines.

In those climates you don't want to do much. I was doing nothing. I was thinking of the sliepherd (my father, I wonder ?) on the hill-sides by Snorridge Bottom, with a long staff, and with a rough white coat in all weathers all the year round, who used to let me lie in a corner of his hut by night, and who used to let me go about with him and his sheep by day when I could get nothing else to do, and who used to give me so little of his victuals and so much of his staff, that I ran away from him—which was what he wanted all along, I expect—to be knocked about the world in preference to Snorridge Bottom. I had been knocked about the world for nine-and-twenty years in all, when I stood looking along those bright blue South American waters. Looking after the shepherd, I may say. Watching him in a half-waking dream, with my eyes half shut, as lie and his flock of sheep, and his two dogs, seemed to move away from the ship's side, far away over the blue water, and to go right down into the sky.

"It's rising out of the water, steady," a voice said close to me. I had been thinking on so, that it like woke me with a start, though it was no stranger voice than the voice of Harry Charker, my own comrade.