that thou hast come back. She thought she had lost thee for good and all, and hath sung, 'Hey ho, my heart is full of woe!' the whole twilight, and would not be comforted. Come, Cicely, doff thy doleful willow-the proverb lies. 'Out of sight, out of mind'— fudge! the boy 's come back again! A plague take proverbs, anyway!" But when the children were both long since abed, and all the house was still save for the scamper of rats in the wall, the heavy door of Nick's room opened stealthily, with a little grating upon the uneven sill, and Master Carew stood there, peeping in, his hand upon the bolt outside. He held a rush-light in the other. Its glimmer fell across the bed upon Nick's tousled hair; and when the master-player saw the boy's head upon the pillow he started eagerly, with brightening eyes. "My soul!" he whispered to himself, a little quaver in his tone, "I would have sworn my own wish lied to me, and that he had not come at all! It cannot be - yet, verily, I am not blind. Ma foi! it passeth understanding—a freed skylark come back to its cage! I thought we had lost him forever." son Nick stirred in his sleep. Carew set the light on the floor. "Thou fool!" said he, and he fumbled at his pouch; "thou dear-belovéd little fool! To catch the skirts of glory in thine hand, and tread the heels of happy chance, and yet come back again to ill-starred twilight --and to me! Ai, lad, I would thou wert my mine own, own son; yet Heaven forbid thee father such as I! For, Nick, I love thee. Yet thou dost hate me like a poison thing. And still I love thee, on my word, and on the remnant of mine honour!" His voice was husky. "Let thee go?-send thee back? eat my sweet and have it too? - how? Nay, nay; thy happy cake would be my dough it will not serve." He shook his head, and looked about to see that all was fast. 66 'Yet, Nick, I say I love thee, on my soul!" by the chimney-side, where supper had been laid. Carew brought a napkin from the linenchest, and spread it upon the board. Then he went to the server's screen and looked behind it, and tried the latches of the doors; and having thus made sure that all was safe, came back to the table again, and setting the rushlight there, turned the contents of his purse into the napkin. There were both gold and silver. The silver he put back into the purse again; the gold he counted carefully; and as he counted, laying the pieces one by one in little heaps upon the cloth, he muttered under his breath, like a small boy adding up his sums in school, saying over and over again, “ One for me, and one for thee, and two for Cicely Carew. One for me, and one for thee, and two for Cicely Carew"; and told the coins off in keeping with the count, so that the last pile was as large as both the others put together. Then slowly ending, "None for me, and one for thee, and two for Cicely Carew," he laid the last three nobles with the rest. Then he arose and stood a moment listening to the silence in the house. An old he rat that was gnawing a rind on the hearth looked up, and ran a little nearer to his hole. "Tsst! come back," said Carew; "I'm no cat!" and from the sliding panel in the wall he took out a buckskin bag tied like a meal-sack with a string. As he slipped the knot the throat of the bag sagged down, and a gold piece jangled on the floor. Carew started as if all his nerves had leaped within him at the unexpected sound, and closed the panel like a flash. Then, setting his foot upon the fallen coin, he stopped its spinning, and with one hand on his poniard, peering right and left, he blew the candle out. A little while he stood and listened in the dark; a little while his feet went to and fro in the darkness. The wind cried in the chimney. Now and then the casements shivered. The timbers in the wall creaked with the cold, and the boards in the stairway cracked. Then the old he rat came back to his rind, and his mate came out of the crack in the wall, working her whiskers hungrily and snuffing the smell of the candle-drip; for there was no sound, and the coast of rat-land was clear. (To be continued.) Slipping to the bedside with stealthy step, he laid a fat little Banbury cheese and some brown sweet cakes beside Nick's pillow; then came out hurriedly and barred the door. The fire in the great hall had gone out, and the room was growing cold. The table stood WHEN noons are hot and very still, Ruffs the fur of a squirrel, and that is all. He tickles the rib of a fat old toad; VOL. XXIV.-92. THE CHESAPEAKE MILL. BY WILLIAM ABBATT. If there is a naval fight in our history about which every school-boy ought to know,-to use an expression of which historians are rather fond, it is the sea-fight between our manof-war "Chesapeake" and the British "Shannon," off Boston harbor, on the first of June, 1813. It has been so often told that I will not tell it over again except in the briefest way. The Chesapeake was captured, chiefly or altogether through the mutinous conduct of part of her crew, who refused to work the cannon on her lower deck at all. Captain Lawrence and Lieutenant Ludlow were killed, or, to be exact, the captain died of his wounds four days after the loss of his ship, and the Shannon took her prize into the harbor of Halifax, where her arrival caused the greatest rejoicing. The dying words of Lawrence, as he was carried from the deck, "Don't give up the ship!" have been familiar to our boys and girls for more than eighty years. It is these words that make the combat most memorable. They are a good motto in every trouble of life. Don't give up the ship - don't despair, lose heart, surrender, but take courage, and, like General Grant, "Fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." With the Chesapeake's entrance into Halifax harbor all trace of her disappears from our smaller histories. Some years after the war of 1812 was over, the English naval authorities decided that the Shannon was useless, and had her broken up. I think, if they had realized how much romance was in after years to attach to the story of the fight, they might have kept the old ship in repair, as Admiral Nelson's old "Victory" has been preserved. The Chesapeake was sent to England, where she must have been an object of great interest; but in 1820 she, too, was taken to pieces. This was probably done in the harbor of Southampton, for her timbers were sold to one John Prior, the owner of a flour-mill in the little town of Wickham, near Southampton. He pulled down his mill, and used the great beams of the American frigate in building a new one. The great deck-timbers, thirty-two feet long and eighteen inches square, served for floorbeams in the mill, and the smaller ones for uprights, all without being cut or altered in any way. Of course many of them were full of the shot fired by the Shannon in the fight, and the shot are there still. When I learned of the strange end of the old ship, the story of which I had read as a boy with no less interest, I hope, than do the boys of to-day, I determined to secure a picture of the mill built of her timbers,-- and here it is. It is not so impressive as some other pictures in the world, for the mill is not very large. Several like it could be put inside any one of the great mills at Minneapolis, and still leave plenty of room for work; but then, it is the Chesapeake Mill (that is the name it has always gone by), and, so far as I know, this is the only picture of it ever made, and certainly the only one in America. I wanted especially a photograph of the interior, but the photographer declared the place was so dark, and so full of machinery, that it was impossible to take a satisfactory picture. I think a Yankee with a kodak, however, would try it, and I hope one will before long. As you see, the building is a squat, brick affair, without a sign of beauty about it; but it will always be of interest to patriotic Ameri cans. Many years ago, a life of Captain Broke, the commander of the Shannon during the action, was published in England, and from it we may make an extract describing the mill: Nothing ship-like or of the sea was to be seen from the outside [of the mill]. A large cigar-box made of the polished pine of the ship, and bearing the word "Chesapeake" in brass nails, stood upon a table. The beams were marked in many places by grapeshot. The mill was merrily going, but as I stood there I remembered that on one of those planks Captain Lawrence fell, mortally wounded, Captain Broke almost so, and the first lieutenant of the Shannon and the third of the Chesapeake died. Thus pondering, I stood, and still the busy hum of the peaceful mill went on. The cigar-box spoken of has disappeared, and the present owner of the mill knows nothing of its whereabouts. The old mill is likely to stand for many years, the only visible reminder of the great sea-fight of 1813, except the tomb of the gallant Captain Lawrence in Trinity Church DRAWN BY HARRY FENN, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY THE AUTHOR. THE CHESAPEAKE MILL. yard, New York, on which are deeply cut a brief story of the battle, and the young captain's immortal words, "DON'T GIVE UP THE SHIP!" |