A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden Part 33

"We shall go up in the air, like a balloon!" one of the sailors, with a tw.a.n.g of horror in his voice, exclaimed.

"Ay, or swamped!" a second suggested, loudly, with dreadful determination.

"Ay, ay; and the deck's as good as stove in!" growled a third nautical son of a Shuhite.

I threw the book I had been perusing on the cabin table, and hurried towards the staircase; but one of my friends met me at the door, and moving with the same velocity as myself, we came into sharp collision.

He rebounded to the right, and I recoiled to the left hand.

"For G.o.d's sake, get out of the way," said he, out of breath, and recovering his legs as fast as he could.

"What's the matter?" I asked, with much alarm. "Is the vessel on fire, or what?"

"No;--nothing," replied he, with a wildness of look that foretold anything but nothing. "Here, steward!" he called out at the top of his voice,--"Alfred!--Gandy!--cook!"--dismay expanding the sources of information, and adding loudness to his vociferation--"Where's my gun?"

The steward, Alfred, Gandy, and the cook were busily employed elsewhere, for they made no reply, and my friend soon found, without their a.s.sistance, what, at first, confusion of mind had hid from his sight.

Breathless, too, with the flushed face and disordered dress of haste and horror, my other fellow traveller came thundering down the companion, and the thick shooting-boots he commonly wore clattered the importance of his approach.

"Gracious heaven!" I exclaimed, "What is all this about? If I am to be----"

"Where's the powder?" asked he, and brushing by me, like a rocket, to get across the cabin, brought his shoulder so forcibly in contact with my chest, that he knocked all the breath out of my lungs, and broke my second sentence into pieces.

"Where's the powder?" again asked he, his voice ascending in the scale of articulation.

"How am I to know?" fulminated the one, angrily, loading his gun with the despatch of an adroit musketeer. "Am I a magazine?"

"No; I know that," said the other, tartly.

"Well; what's the good of baiting a fellow when he's busy," replied the first decisively.

I could rest no longer in ignorance of my fate, and I scrambled on deck.

The vessel labouring very much in a heavy sea, had not a st.i.tch of canva.s.s on her, and her bare mast tapered into the air like a cocoa-nut tree that had been discrowned.

"What is all this?" I said, appealing to one man who had hold of the tiller, and, with his neck extended like a race-horse, seemed to be steering as if the greatest way was on the vessel.

"Look there, your Honour," and without removing his eyes from the bow of the cutter, he pointed the thumb of his left hand over his shoulder. I turned, and saw, half a mile astern, the cause of all this uproar. But I had barely a clear conception of what I was looking at, when my companions with loaded guns reappeared on deck. The triggers clicked, and I a.s.sumed their guns were to be discharged at once, but D---- called out,

"Not yet; it's too far off."

"Tell us when to fire, then," said my two friends, filing themselves in that att.i.tude which the reader may have observed in a regiment of soldiers, when the word is given to "present."

"What!" I cried out, now that I found my senses by the visual elucidation of the threatened evil;

"What! you don't mean to say you are going to fire with a couple of fowling pieces at a water-spout?"

"To be sure, Sir," answered D----, giving me a momentary glance that he ventured to take, clandestinely, from the water-spout. "Don't they fire guns to break them?"

"Yes," I replied, "people do,--cannon!"

However, I could not get any one to agree with me, that a rifle-ball would have just as much effect on the dispersion of the huge water-spout that boiled and waved, like an elastic tower, to and fro with the wind, and roared in the wake of the yacht, as a sigh would arrest the rotation of Sirius; and so, placing my life in the custody of Providence, I went back to my book, and left my companions standing on the p.o.o.p with guns presented, and the whole crew with leaping hearts and open mouths waiting the efficacy of their artillery. I did not hear the discharge of the two guns; but the water-spout kept them in great trepidation, by approaching within a hundred yards of the cutter, and then resolving into its native cloud and water.

The following day the high lands in the vicinity of Whitby in Yorkshire were seen; and at four o'clock the same afternoon we pa.s.sed close under the frowning headland, on which the old ruins of the castle stand. A south-west wind appearing desirous to treat us with another gale, we brought up off Scarborough for the night; and notwithstanding the swell which precluded all other boats from intercourse with the sh.o.r.e, we managed to reach the land in a gig, and stretched our legs on English ground again.

Early in the morning P---- left us for London, fearful that the wind might detain us some time at Scarborough; but five hours after his departure, at mid-day, with a fresh breeze, we got under weigh; and, though the wind continued heading us the whole distance, reached Yarmouth as the clocks in the town were striking eight.

Having made up our minds not to remain more than the night at this place, the cutter lay in the roadstead.

We must have arrived at a moment of some gaiety, for on a terrace facing the sea, a band was playing, and all the inhabitants had congregated to converse and walk. What a contrast to the country from which we had just come! No man can judge of the superiority of England, whether in the beauty and elegance of its women, the cleanliness of its towns, the multiplicity and aptness of its comforts, but he who has wandered in other parts of the world. Grumblers are domestic; just the same as spoiled brats cry for the very sake of peevishness, because they know not the pain of denial. As I have not much more time to speak, I would, with my last breath, recommend discontented people to travel; but if they should come back in the same fretful condition, well, let them go to----Bath;--no further.

At six o'clock on the morning of the 12th of August, we sailed from Yarmouth, and at a quarter to seven in the evening, the anchor of the Iris dropped within thirty yards of the pier-head at Erith.

By the first flush of day, taking the early tide, the cutter crept up the familiar, winding River; and while yet I pondered on the reason why I should love my own land, with its yellow sky and puffing toil, better than the pure Heaven and kindly ease of foreign strands, the Hospital of Greenwich lay within the cast of a stone. The crimson flag was waving on the western turret, just as it waved in May, and so, with his two wooden legs projecting at right angles to his body, sat alone, on the same bench, the lone old pensioner. I seemed to have been sleeping for three months. I felt sad, and knew not why. How ideal is the reality of life!

and the inexpressive cause of grief is the consciousness of that truth.

The sailors, as they furled the sails, talked of home. The deer and fawn, ceasing to ruminate, viewed their new country with surprise; but Jacko going into Sailor's hutch, begged, without doubt, to know if he might ride through the town on his back; and Greenwich, like Brundusium, was,

"longae finis chartaeque viaeque."

As all men are not of the same stature, so their minds differ in the means of accepting knowledge, or entertainment, and to please every one is a difficult thing. To hope, therefore, that I should afford amus.e.m.e.nt to all who read these pages, would be to aspire for that which has not fallen to the lot of any one; but if out of the incongruity of opinions I have expressed, be they ever so weak, or opposed to each other, instruction may be taken, then I shall not have striven without a result. For me, I have no moral lesson to teach; but by writing, to repeat what I have witnessed, and by that repet.i.tion to impart to others those things which, sheltered, though of the same world, by a different sky, and shadowed by other customs, were pleasing to my mind and sight.

My task is done; and, like a dream, is dreamt the recollection of human things already changed and ever changing. The remembrance of the interesting country through which I have been travelling shall abide by me always; for, encouraged by the desire to speak and muse, as I do now, of the hardy, freely happy, and contented sons of its mountains, I first learned that no greater blessing could be granted than a life of honourable industry, and that, pine who might beneath the infliction of mental or bodily exertion, I had known the exalted destiny of creation in the effort to be useful. Like an exile turning to take a last glance at the blue outlines of his native land, I, too, have lingered to look back; yet the pleasant retrospection of three happy months is at an end; and I now dream of its delight as one who feels that, in the swift transition of existence, such peace of mind can never come again.

THE END.

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