She had been born at Everton, Liverpool, and, since she had begun to walk, she had lived with a severe old grandmother, who grew more cross as she aged. From childhood, she had known nothing but ill-treatment; she was scolded and slapped perpetually. When she was twelve years of age, she began to struggle with her granny, and, in a short time, she proved that her strength was too great to be beaten by an infirm old woman; little by little, her grandmother desisted from the attempt, but substituted, instead, the nagging system. As she approached her fourteenth year, her grandmother developed a parsimony which made her positively hateful. Every crust she ate at the house was begrudged to her, though, so far as she knew, there was no cause for this pinching and starving. Her home contained evidences of respectability. The furniture was abundant and of good quality, and the many curios in the glass cases in the parlour showed that her parents had been in comfortable circumstances. How her grandmother obtained her means of living, Alice did not know; but, judging from her dress and condition, her poverty was not so distressing as to be the cause of such extreme penuriousness. During the last five or six months, as she was getting on to fifteen, Alice had been acquainted with girlish neighbours, and through them, with some young middies who had just returned from their voyages. These had delighted to tell her friends of the wonders of foreign lands, and of the genial welcome they had met with from their foreign friends. The stories of their sea-life, and the pictures of America which they gave, fascinated her; and she secretly resolved that, upon the first violent outbreak of her grandmother’s temper, she would try her fortune as a cabin-boy. With this view, every penny she could scrape, or steal, from her grandmother she hoarded, until, at last, she had enough to purchase from a slop-shop all she needed for a disguise. When her grandmother finally broke out into a bad fit of temper, and, provoked by her defiance, ordered her out of the house, she was ready for her venture. She went to a barber’s shop and had her hair cut close; returning home, she dressed herself in boy’s costume, and, with a sailor’s bag on her back, entered a boarding-house near the docks. A few days later, she had the good luck to be engaged as a cabin-boy by the captain of the ‘Pocahontas,’ and, by careful conduct, escaped detection during the voyage, though nothing would avail her to avoid the rope’s ending and cuffing of the steward and his fellow-officers.