Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/206

202 from young Frank of Derwentwater is making her comfortable enough. Alas! but youth be easily pleased—it is as the Northern song says:

but old age is a delightless time!"

To moor the bark was the labour of a few moments; and fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts welcomed the youths they had long reckoned among the dead with affection and tears. All had some friendly hand and eye to welcome and rejoice in them, save the brave old mariner, Richard Faulder alone. To him no one spoke, on him no eye was turned; all seemed desirous of shunning communication with a man to whom common belief attributed endowments and powers, which came not as knowledge and might come to other men; and whose wisdom was of that kind against which the most prudent divines and the most skilful legislators, directed the rebuke of church and law. I remember hearing my father say, that when Richard Faulder, who was equally skilful in horsemanship and navigation, offered to stand on his grey horse's bare back, and gallop down the street of Allanbay, he was prevented from betting against the accomplishment of this equestrian vaunt by a wary Scotchman, who, in the brief manner of his country, said, "Dinna wager, Thomas—God guide your wits—that man's no cannie!" At that time, though a stripling of seventeen, and possessed strongly with the belief of the mariner's singular powers, I could not avoid sympathizing with his fortune and the forlorn look with which he stood on the deck while his companions were welcomed and caressed on shore. Nothing, indeed, could equal the joy which fathers and mothers manifested towards their children but the affection and tenderness with which they were hailed by the bright eyes of the Cumbrian maidens.

"His name be praised!" said one old man, to whose bosom a son had been unexpectedly delivered from the waves.

"And blessed be the hour ye were saved from the salt sea and that fearful man," said a maiden, whose blushing cheek and brightening eye indicated more than common sympathy.

"And oh! Stephen Porter, my son," resumed the father, "never set foot on shipboard with that mariner more!"