Westward Ho! | Page 7

to-night?"
"Sir Richard Grenville."
"Dick Grenville? I did not know he was in town. Go home and tell your
father John Oxenham will come and keep him company. There, off
with you! I'll make all straight with the good gentleman, and you shall
have your venture with me; and as for the horn, let him have the horn,
Yeo, and I'll give you a noble for it."
"Not a penny, noble captain. If young master will take a poor mariner's
gift, there it is, for the sake of his love to the calling, and Heaven send
him luck therein." And the good fellow, with the impulsive generosity
of a true sailor, thrust the horn into the boy's hands, and walked away to
escape thanks.
"And now," quoth Oxenham, "my merry men all, make up your minds
what mannered men you be minded to be before you take your bounties.
I want none of your rascally lurching longshore vermin, who get five
pounds out of this captain, and ten out of that, and let him sail without
them after all, while they are stowed away under women's mufflers,
and in tavern cellars. If any man is of that humor, he had better to cut
himself up, and salt himself down in a barrel for pork, before he meets
me again; for by this light, let me catch him, be it seven years hence,
and if I do not cut his throat upon the streets, it's a pity! But if any man
will be true brother to me, true brother to him I'll be, come wreck or

prize, storm or calm, salt water or fresh, victuals or none, share and fare
alike; and here's my hand upon it, for every man and all! and so--
"Westward ho! with a rumbelow, And hurra for the Spanish Main, O!"
After which oration Mr. Oxenham swaggered into the tavern, followed
by his new men; and the boy took his way homewards, nursing his
precious horn, trembling between hope and fear, and blushing with
maidenly shame, and a half-sense of wrong-doing at having revealed
suddenly to a stranger the darling wish which he had hidden from his
father and mother ever since he was ten years old.
Now this young gentleman, Amyas Leigh, though come of as good
blood as any in Devon, and having lived all his life in what we should
even now call the very best society, and being (on account of the valor,
courtesy, and truly noble qualities which he showed forth in his most
eventful life) chosen by me as the hero and centre of this story, was not,
saving for his good looks, by any means what would be called
now-a-days an "interesting" youth, still less a "highly educated" one;
for, with the exception of a little Latin, which had been driven into him
by repeated blows, as if it had been a nail, he knew no books
whatsoever, save his Bible, his Prayer-book, the old "Mort d'Arthur" of
Caxton's edition, which lay in the great bay window in the hall, and the
translation of "Las Casas' History of the West Indies," which lay beside
it, lately done into English under the title of "The Cruelties of the
Spaniards." He devoutly believed in fairies, whom he called pixies; and
held that they changed babies, and made the mushroom rings on the
downs to dance in. When he had warts or burns, he went to the white
witch at Northam to charm them away; he thought that the sun moved
round the earth, and that the moon had some kindred with a Cheshire
cheese. He held that the swallows slept all the winter at the bottom of
the horse-pond; talked, like Raleigh, Grenville, and other low persons,
with a broad Devonshire accent; and was in many other respects so
very ignorant a youth, that any pert monitor in a national school might
have had a hearty laugh at him. Nevertheless, this ignorant young
savage, vacant of the glorious gains of the nineteenth century,
children's literature and science made easy, and, worst of all, of those

improved views of English history now current among our railway
essayists, which consist in believing all persons, male and female,
before the year 1688, and nearly all after it, to have been either
hypocrites or fools, had learnt certain things which he would hardly
have been taught just now in any school in England; for his training
had been that of the old Persians, "to speak the truth and to draw the
bow," both of which savage virtues he had acquired to perfection, as
well as the equally savage ones of enduring pain cheerfully, and of
believing it to be the finest thing in the world to be a gentleman; by
which word he had been taught to