Now the risk of Susannah's discovering their escape and pursuing was the one bitter drop in the cup of these truants' happiness. Susannah--a middle-aged, ill-favoured spinster, daughter of a yeoman-farmer, with whose second wife she could not agree--scorned the sea and all sailors. Once, as a girl, she had committed her ample person to a sailing boat, and, thank God! that one lesson had been enough. Ships came and went under the windows of Hall, but in the children's eyes they and their crews belonged to an unknown world. Things real to them were the farm and farm stock, harvests and harvest-homes, the waggoners' teams, byres, orchards, garden, and cool dairy. Ships' captains arrived out of fairyland sometimes, and crossed the straw-littered townplace to hold audience with their grandfather; magic odours of hemp and pitch, magic chanty songs and clanking of windlasses called to them up the hill; but until this morning they had never dared to obey the call. Had Clem been as other boys--. But, being blind, he trusted to Myra, and Myra was a girl. "Come aboard and have a drink of something cordial!" continued Mrs. Purchase, holding the teapot aloft. She walked forward and looked down on the workers. "Now you may sing, boys, if't pleases 'ee." "Thank'ee, ma'am," answered up Billy Daddo; "then lev' us make a start with Wrestling Jacob, Part Two--" 'Lame as I am, I take the prey'-- "'Tis a pleasant old tune and never comes amiss, but for choice o' seasons give me the dew o' the mornin'." He pitched the note in high falsetto, and after a couple of bars five or six near comrades joined in together-- "Speak to me now, for I am weak, But confident in self-despair: Speak to my heart, in blessings speak; Be conquer'd by my instant prayer! Speak, or thou never hence shall move, And tell me if thy name is Love." Billy Daddo's gang hailed from a parish, three miles up the coast, noted for containing "but one man that couldn't preach, and that was the parson." Their fellow-labourers--the crew of the barque and half-a-score longshoremen belonging to the port--heard without thought of deriding. Though themselves unconverted--for life in a town, especially in a seaport town, makes men curious and critical rather than intense, and life in a ship ruled by Mrs. Purchase did not encourage visionaries--they were accustomed to the fervours of the redeemed. "'Tis Love! 'tis Love! thou diedst for me: I hear thy whisper in my heart--!" "Brayvo! 'tis workin'! 'tis workin'! Give it tongue, brother Langman!" cried Billy, as a stevedore within the hold broke forth into a stentorian bass that made the ship rumble-- "The morning breaks, the shadows flee, Pure universal Love thou art: To me, to me thy bowels move, Thy nature and thy name is Love!"