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affection, for he had come to take a great interest in him.

"At any rate, Cyril," he said, "your time here has not been wasted,

and your mother's gift has been turned to as much advantage as even

she can have hoped that it would be. Should your father's hopes be

again disappointed, and fresh delays arise, you may, with the

practice you have had, be able to earn your living in London. There

must be there, as in France, many persons in trade who have had but

little education, and you may be able to obtain employment in keeping

the books of such people, who are, I believe, more common in England

than here. Here are the sixteen louis that still remain; put them

aside, Cyril, and use them only for urgent necessity."

Cyril, on arriving in London, was heartily welcomed by his father,

who had, for the moment, high hopes of recovering his estates. These,

however, soon faded, and although Sir Aubrey would not allow it, even

to himself, no chance remained of those Royalists, who had, like him,

parted with their estates for trifling sums, to be spent in the

King's service, ever regaining possession of them.

It was not long before Cyril perceived that unless he himself

obtained work of some sort they would soon be face to face with

actual starvation. He said nothing to his father, but started out one

morning on a round of visits among the smaller class of shopkeepers,

offering to make up their books and write out their bills and

accounts for a small remuneration. As he had a frank and pleasant

face, and his foreign bringing up had given him an ease and

politeness of manner rare among English lads of the day, it was not

long before he obtained several clients. To some of the smaller class

of traders he went only for an hour or two, once a week, while others

required their bills and accounts to be made out daily. The pay was

very small, but it sufficed to keep absolute want from the door. When

he told his father of the arrangements he had made, Sir Aubrey at

first raged and stormed; but he had come, during the last year or

two, to recognise the good sense and strong will of his son, and

although he never verbally acquiesced in what he considered a

degradation, he offered no actual opposition to a plan that at least

enabled them to live, and furnished him occasionally with a few

groats with which he could visit a tavern.

So things had gone on for more than a year. Cyril was now sixteen,

and his punctuality, and the neatness of his work, had been so

appreciated by the tradesmen who first employed him, that his time

was now fully occupied, and that at rates more remunerative than

those he had at first obtained. He kept the state of his resources to

himself, and had no difficulty in doing this, as his father never

alluded to the subject of his work. Cyril knew that, did he hand over

to him all the money he made, it would be wasted in drink or at

cards; consequently, he kept the table furnished as modestly as at

first, and regularly placed after dinner on the corner of the mantel

a few coins, which his father as regularly dropped into his pocket.

A few days before the story opens, Sir Aubrey had, late one evening,

been carried upstairs, mortally wounded in a brawl; he only recovered

consciousness a few minutes before his death.

"You have been a good lad, Cyril," he said faintly, as he feebly

pressed the boy's hand; "far better than I deserve to have had. Don't

cry, lad; you will get on better without me, and things are just as

well as they are. I hope you will come to your estates some day; you

will make a better master than I should ever have done. I hope that

in time you will carry out your plan of entering some foreign

service; there is no chance here. I don't want you to settle down as

a city scrivener. Still, do as you like, lad, and unless your wishes

go with mine, think no further of service."

"I would rather be a soldier, father. I only undertook this work

because I could see nothing else."

"That is right, my boy, that is right. I know you won't forget that

you come of a race of gentlemen."

He spoke but little after that. A few broken words came from his lips

that showed that his thoughts had gone back to old times. "Boot and

saddle," he murmured. "That is right. Now we are ready for them. Down

with the prick-eared knaves! God and King Charles!" These were the

last words he spoke.

Cyril had done all that was necessary. He had laid by more than half

his earnings for the last eight or nine months. One of his clients,

an undertaker, had made all the necessary preparations for the

funeral, and in a few hours his father would be borne to his last

resting-place. As he stood at the open window he thought sadly over

the past, and of his father's wasted life. Had it not been for the

war he might have lived and died a country gentleman. It was the war,

with its wild excitements, that had ruined him. What was there for

him to do in a foreign country, without resource or employment,

having no love for reading, but to waste his life as he had done? Had

his wife lived it might have been different. Cyril had still a vivid

remembrance of his mother, and, though his father had but seldom

spoken to him of her, he knew that he had loved her, and that, had

she lived, he would never have given way to drink as he had done of

late years.

To his father's faults he could not be blind; but they stood for

nothing now. He had been his only friend, and of late they had been

drawn closer to each other in their loneliness; and although scarce a

word of endearment had passed between them, he knew that his father

had cared for him more than was apparent in his manner.

A few hours later, Sir Aubrey Shenstone was laid to rest in a little

graveyard outside the city walls. Cyril was the only mourner; and

when it was over, instead of going back to his lonely room, he turned

away and wandered far out through the fields towards Hampstead, and

then sat himself down to think what he had best do. Another three or

four years must pass before he could try to get service abroad. When

the time came he should find Sir John Parton, and beg him to procure

for him some letter of introduction to the many British gentlemen

serving abroad. He had not seen him since he came to England. His

father had met him, but had quarrelled with him upon Sir John

declining to interest himself actively to push his claims, and had

forbidden Cyril to go near those who had been so kind to him.

The boy had felt it greatly at first, but he came, after a time, to

see that it was best so. It seemed to him that he had fallen

altogether out of their station in life when the hope of his father's

recovering his estates vanished, and although he was sure of a kindly

reception from Lady Parton, he shrank from going there in his present

position. They had done so much for him already, that the thought

that his visit might seem to them a sort of petition for further

benefits was intolerable to him.

For the present, the question in his mind was whether he should

continue at his present work, which at any rate sufficed to keep him,

or should seek other employment. He would greatly have preferred some

life of action,--something that would fit him better to bear the

fatigues and hardships of war,--but he saw no prospect of obtaining

any such position.

"I should be a fool to throw up what I have," he said to himself at

last. "I will stick to it anyhow until some opportunity offers; but

the sooner I leave it the better. It was bad enough before; it will

be worse now. If I had but a friend or two it would not be so hard;

but to have no one to speak to, and no one to think about, when work

is done, will be lonely indeed."

At any rate, he determined to change his room as soon as possible. It

mattered little where he went so that it was a change. He thought

over various tradesmen for whom he worked. Some of them might have an

attic, he cared not how small, that they might let him have in lieu

of paying him for his work. Even if they never spoke to him, it would

be better to be in a house where he knew something of those

downstairs, than to lodge in one where he was an utter stranger to

all. He had gone round to the shops where he worked, on the day after

his father's death, to explain that he could not come again until

after the funeral, and he resolved that next morning he would ask

each in turn whether he could obtain a lodging with them.

The sun was already setting when he rose from the bank on which he

had seated himself, and returned to the city. The room did not feel

so lonely to him as it would have done had he not been accustomed to

spending the evenings alone. He took out his little hoard and counted

it. After paying the expenses of the funeral there would still remain

sufficient to keep him for three or four months should he fall ill,

or, from any cause, lose his work. He had one good suit of clothes

that had been bought on his return to England,--when his father

thought that they would assuredly be going down almost immediately to

take possession of the old Hall,--and the rest were all in fair

condition.

The next day he began his work again; he had two visits to pay of an

hour each, and one of two hours, and the spare time between these he

filled up by calling at two or three other shops to make up for the

arrears of work during the last few days.

The last place he had to visit was that at which he had the longest

task to perform. It was at a ship-chandler's in Tower Street, a large

and dingy house, the lower portion being filled with canvas, cordage,

barrels of pitch and tar, candles, oil, and matters of all sorts

needed by ship-masters, including many cannon of different sizes,

piles of balls, anchors, and other heavy work, all of which were

stowed away in a yard behind it. The owner of this store was a

one-armed man. His father had kept it before him, but he himself,

after working there long enough to become a citizen and a member of

the Ironmongers' Guild, had quarrelled with his father and had taken

to the sea. For twenty years he had voyaged to many lands,

principally in ships trading in the Levant, and had passed through a

great many adventures, including several fights with the Moorish

corsairs. In the last voyage he took, he had had his arm shot off by

a ball from a Greek pirate among the Islands. He had long before made

up his differences with his father, but had resisted the latter's

entreaties that he should give up the sea and settle down at the

shop; on his return after this unfortunate voyage he told him that he

had come home to stay.

"I shall be able to help about the stores after a while," he said,

"but I shall never be the man I was on board ship. It will be hard

work to take to measuring out canvas and to weighing iron, after a

free life on the sea, but I don't so much mind now I have had my

share of adventures; though I dare say I should have gone on for a

few more years if that rascally ball had not carried away my arm. I

don't know but that it is best as it is, for the older I got the

harder I should find it to fall into new ways and to settle down

here."

"Anyhow, I am glad you are back, David," his father said.

"You are forty-five, and though I don't say it would not have been

better if you had remained here from the first, you have learnt many

things you would not have learnt here. You know just the sort of

things that masters of ships require, and what canvas and cables and

cordage will suit their wants. Besides, customers like to talk with

men of their own way of thinking, and sailors more, I think, than

other men. You know, too, most of the captains who sail up the

Mediterranean, and may be able to bring fresh custom into the shop.

Therefore, do not think that you will be of no use to me. As to your

wife and child, there is plenty of room for them as well as for you,

and it will be better for them here, with you always at hand, than it

would be for them to remain over at Rotherhithe and only to see you

after the shutters are up."

Eight years later Captain Dave, as he was always called, became sole

owner of the house and business. A year after he did so he was

lamenting to a friend the trouble that he had with his accounts.

"My father always kept that part of the business in his own hands,"

he said, "and I find it a mighty heavy burden. Beyond checking a bill

of lading, or reading the marks on the bales and boxes, I never had

occasion to read or write for twenty years, and there has not been

much more of it for the last fifteen; and although I was a smart

scholar enough in my young days, my fingers are stiff with hauling at

ropes and using the marling-spike, and my eyes are not so clear as

they used to be, and it is no slight toil and labour to me to make up

an account for goods sold. John Wilkes, my head shopman, is a handy

fellow; he was my boatswain in the _Kate_, and I took him on when we

found that the man who had been my father's right hand for twenty

years had been cheating him all along. We got on well enough as long

as I could give all my time in the shop; but he is no good with the

pen--all he can do is to enter receipts and sales.

"He has a man under him, who helps him in measuring out the right

length of canvas and cables or for weighing a chain or an anchor, and

knows enough to put down the figures; but that is all. Then there are

the two smiths and the two apprentices; they don't count in the

matter. Robert Ashford, the eldest apprentice, could do the work, but

I have no fancy for him; he does not look one straight in the face as

one who is honest and above board should do. I shall have to keep a

clerk, and I know what it will be--he will be setting me right, and I

shall not feel my own master; he will be out of place in my crew

altogether. I never liked pursers; most of them are rogues. Still, I

suppose it must come to that."