Westward Ho! | Page 8

understand the careful habit of
causing needless pain to no human being, poor or rich, and of taking
pride in giving up his own pleasure for the sake of those who were
weaker than himself. Moreover, having been entrusted for the last year
with the breaking of a colt, and the care of a cast of young hawks which
his father had received from Lundy Isle, he had been profiting much,
by the means of those coarse and frivolous amusements, in
perseverance, thoughtfulness, and the habit of keeping his temper; and
though he had never had a single "object lesson," or been taught to "use
his intellectual powers," he knew the names and ways of every bird,
and fish, and fly, and could read, as cunningly as the oldest sailor, the
meaning of every drift of cloud which crossed the heavens. Lastly, he
had been for some time past, on account of his extraordinary size and
strength, undisputed cock of the school, and the most terrible fighter
among all Bideford boys; in which brutal habit he took much delight,
and contrived, strange as it may seem, to extract from it good, not only
for himself but for others, doing justice among his school-fellows with
a heavy hand, and succoring the oppressed and afflicted; so that he was
the terror of all the sailor-lads, and the pride and stay of all the town's
boys and girls, and hardly considered that he had done his duty in his
calling if he went home without beating a big lad for bullying a little
one. For the rest, he never thought about thinking, or felt about feeling;
and had no ambition whatsoever beyond pleasing his father and mother,
getting by honest means the maximum of "red quarrenders" and mazard
cherries, and going to sea when he was big enough. Neither was he
what would be now-a-days called by many a pious child; for though he
said his Creed and Lord's Prayer night and morning, and went to the
service at the church every forenoon, and read the day's Psalms with his

mother every evening, and had learnt from her and from his father (as
he proved well in after life) that it was infinitely noble to do right and
infinitely base to do wrong, yet (the age of children's religious books
not having yet dawned on the world) he knew nothing more of theology,
or of his own soul, than is contained in the Church Catechism. It is a
question, however, on the whole, whether, though grossly ignorant
(according to our modern notions) in science and religion, he was
altogether untrained in manhood, virtue, and godliness; and whether the
barbaric narrowness of his information was not somewhat
counterbalanced both in him and in the rest of his generation by the
depth, and breadth, and healthiness of his education.
So let us watch him up the hill as he goes hugging his horn, to tell all
that has passed to his mother, from whom he had never hidden
anything in his life, save only that sea-fever; and that only because he
foreknew that it would give her pain; and because, moreover, being a
prudent and sensible lad, he knew that he was not yet old enough to go,
and that, as he expressed it to her that afternoon, "there was no use
hollaing till he was out of the wood."
So he goes up between the rich lane-banks, heavy with drooping ferns
and honeysuckle; out upon the windy down toward the old Court,
nestled amid its ring of wind-clipt oaks; through the gray gateway into
the homeclose; and then he pauses a moment to look around; first at the
wide bay to the westward, with its southern wall of purple cliffs; then at
the dim Isle of Lundy far away at sea; then at the cliffs and downs of
Morte and Braunton, right in front of him; then at the vast yellow sheet
of rolling sand-hill, and green alluvial plain dotted with red cattle, at his
feet, through which the silver estuary winds onward toward the sea.
Beneath him, on his right, the Torridge, like a land-locked lake, sleeps
broad and bright between the old park of Tapeley and the charmed rock
of the Hubbastone, where, seven hundred years ago, the Norse rovers
landed to lay siege to Kenwith Castle, a mile away on his left hand; and
not three fields away, are the old stones of "The Bloody Corner," where
the retreating Danes, cut off from their ships, made their last fruitless
stand against the Saxon sheriff and the valiant men of Devon. Within
that charmed rock, so Torridge boatmen tell, sleeps now the old Norse

Viking in his leaden coffin, with all his fairy treasure and his crown of
gold; and as the boy looks