There is Sorrow on the Sea

There is Sorrow on the Sea

The Project Gutenberg EBook There Is Sorrow On The Sea, by G.
Parker #82 in our series by Gilbert Parker
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Title: There is Sorrow On The Sea
Author: Gilbert Parker
Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6255] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on October 31,
2002]

Edition: 10
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SORROW
ON THE SEA BY PARKER ***

This eBook was produced by David Widger

"THERE IS SORROW ON THE SEA"
By Gilbert Parker

I
"YORK FACTORY, HUDSON'S BAY, "23rd September, 1747.
"MY DEAR COUSIN FANNY,--It was a year last April Fool's Day, I
left you on the sands there at Mablethorpe, no more than a stone's
throw from the Book-in-Hand Inn, swearing that you should never see
me or hear from me again. You remember how we saw the
coast-guards flash their lights here and there, as they searched the sands
for me? how one came bundling down the bank, calling, 'Who goes
there?' You remember that when I said, 'A friend,' he stumbled, and his
light fell to the sands and went out, and in the darkness you and I stole
away: you to your home, with a whispering, 'God-bless-you, Cousin
Dick,' over your shoulder, and I with a bit of a laugh that, maybe, cut to
the heart, and that split in a sob in my own throat--though you didn't
hear that.
"'Twas a bad night's work that, Cousin Fanny, and maybe I wish it

undone, and maybe I don't; but a devil gets into the heart of a man
when he has to fly from the lass he loves, while the friends of his youth
go hunting him with muskets, and he has to steal out of the backdoor of
his own country and shelter himself, like a cold sparrow, up in the
eaves of the world.
"Ay, lass, that's how I left the fens of Lincolnshire a year last April
Fool's Day. There wasn't a dyke from, Lincoln town to Mablethorpe
that I hadn't crossed with a running jump; and there wasn't a break in
the shore, or a sink-hole in the sand, or a clump of rushes, or a
samphire bed, from Skegness to Theddlethorpe, that I didn't know like
every line of your face. And when I was a slip of a lad-ay, and later
too--how you and I used to snuggle into little nooks of the sand-hills,
maybe just beneath the coast-guard's hut, and watch the tide come
swilling in-water- daisies you used to call the breaking surf, Cousin
Fanny. And that was like you, always with a fancy about everything
you saw. And when the ships, the fishing-smacks with their red sails,
and the tall-masted brigs went by, taking the white foam on their
canvas, you used to wish that you might sail away to the lands you'd
heard tell of from old skippers that gathered round my uncle's fire in
the Book-in-Hand. Ay, a grand thing I thought it would be, too, to go
riding round the world on a well-washed deck, with plenty of food and
grog, and maybe, by-and-by, to be first mate, and lord it from fo'castle
bunk to stern-rail.
"You did not know, did you, who was the coast-guardsman that
stumbled as he came on us that night? It looked a stupid thing to do that,
and let the lantern fall. But, lass, 'twas done o' purpose. That was the
one man in all the parish that would ha' risked his neck to let me free.
'Twas Lancy Doane, who's give me as many beatings in his time as I
him. We were always getting foul one o' t'other since I was big enough
to shy a bit of turf at him across a dyke, and there isn't a spot on's body
that I