But I must return to my mother, who, when she first went to Woolwich, which she did in a transport that was ordered round, took lodgings in the outskirts of the town; and not wishing to acknowledge that she had married a common sailor, as she supposed my father still to be, asserted that she was the wife of a captain of a merchant vessel, which had been taken up as a transport to convey troops to the West Indies. On this supposition, being received into a society above her real station, she was compelled to spend more money than she could afford, and her finances rapidly wasted away. In the meantime I was born--a fine baby, but with nothing to look up to but a penniless mother, an absent (if existing) father, the work and the sky. CHAPTER THREE. IN WHICH MY MOTHER PROVES HERSELF A TENDER WIFE, AND AT THE SAME TIME SHOWS HER PATRIOTISM AND DEVOTION TO HER COUNTRY. I had almost unconsciously arrived at the age of two years before there were any tidings of my father. All the information that my mother could obtain was, that the ship's company of the Druid had been turned over to another frigate called the Melpomene, the former having been declared not seaworthy, and in consequence condemned and broken up at Port Royal. But no letter had been received from my father, who indeed was not much of a scholar; he could read, but he could not write. By this time my mother's savings were expended, and she was in great tribulation lest the deceit she had practised should be exposed. Indeed, there were already many surmises as to the truth of her story, it being so long that her husband had been absent. At last, when she had changed her only remaining guinea, a letter arrived from my father, dated from Portsmouth, stating that the ship was to be paid off in a few days, and then "he would clap on all sail and be on board of his old woman in no time."