The Romance of the Coast | Page 8

would not give way, and so he submitted.
Long afterwards the Veteran used to tell us that that was one of the best
moments of his life, although his heart had been so heavy at going
away from home. So the young sailor joined the "Minotaur" and fought
at the Nile. He was many years at sea; and before he got back to the
town he had risen to be sailing-master of a forty-four. When he came to
be married, all the little vessels in the harbour made themselves gay
with their colours, and the church bells were rung for him as though he
had been a great personage.
He lived long enough for his brief story to be forgotten; and only the
clergyman and the squire, among all the people of the village where he
died, knew that the old man was in the least a hero. They knew that he
was fond of children, and they were all willing to run to oblige him.
Perhaps he wanted no better reward. In these days of advertisement,
much would have been made of him; for the great Collingwood had
specially mentioned him for a brilliant act of bravery. As it was, he got
very little pension and no fame.

THE HEROINE OF A FISHING VILLAGE.
Until she was nineteen years old, Dorothy lived a very uneventful life;
for one week was much the same as another in the placid existence of
the village. On Sunday mornings, when the church-bells began to ring,

you would meet her walking over the moor with a springy step. Her
shawl was gay, and her dress was of the most pronounced colour that
could be bought in the market-town. Her brown hair was gathered in a
net, and her calm eyes looked from under an old-fashioned bonnet of
straw. Her feet were always bare, but she carried her shoes and
stockings slung over her shoulder. When she got near the church she sat
down in the shade of a hedge and put them on; then she walked the rest
of the distance with a cramped and civilized gait. On the Monday
mornings early she carried the water from the well. Her great "skeel"
was poised easily on her head; and, as she strode along singing lightly
without shaking a drop of water over the edge of her pail, you could see
how she had come by her erect carriage. When the boats came in, she
went to the beach and helped to carry the baskets of fish to the cart. She
was then dressed in a sort of thick flannel blouse and a singular
quantity of brief petticoats. Her head was bare, and she looked far
better than in her Sunday clothes. If the morning were fine she sat out
in the sun and baited the lines, all the while lilting old country songs in
her guttural dialect. In the evening she would spend some time chatting
with other lasses in the Row; but she never had a very long spell of that
pastime, for she had to be at work winter and summer by about five or
six in the morning. The fisher-folk do not waste many candles by
keeping late hours. She was very healthy and powerful, very ignorant,
and very modest. Had she lived by one of the big harbours, where fleets
of boats come in, she might have been as rough and brazen as the girls
often are in those places. But in her secluded little village the ways of
the people were old-fashioned and decorous; and girls were very
restrained in their manners. No one would have taken her to be
anything more than an ordinary country girl had not a chance enabled
her to show herself full of bravery and resource.
Every boat in the village went away North one evening, and not a man
remained in the Row excepting three very old fellows, who were long
past work of any kind. When a fisherman grows helpless with age he is
kept by his own people, and his days are passed in quietly smoking on
the kitchen settle or in looking dimly out over the sea from the bench at
the door. But a man must be sorely "failed" before he is reduced to
idleness, and able to do nothing that needs strength. A southerly gale,

with a southerly sea, came away in the night, and the boats could not
beat down from the northward. By daylight they were all safe in a
harbour about eighteen miles north of the village. The sea grew worse
and worse, till the usual clouds of foam flew against the houses or
skimmed away into the fields beyond. When the wind reached its
height the sounds it made in the hollows were like distant