“Do you think I keep servants, giving them board and bed, to see them a-lolling back agin’ my walls and postës, a-playing the fine gentleman abroad? No, no, Oliver Charlock, you remember what you’re here for, and where you comes from; and let me see all them kegs in their places, or back you goes to your field, and finds another master.” Oliver was nobody’s child, and had been picked up in a field of charlock. Just where the rough margin of the field joins the yellow flowers, he had been found by the old parson ten years before the time of which I speak. But when the Rectory changed hands, and the old housekeeper died, who had reared him, he was left friendless. Then Crumblejohn had taken him as an extra lad at the Mariner’s, and henceforth life opened for him at a different page. He slept in a rat-riddled garret on a worn-out wool-sack on the floor. He rose at dawn and worked till the bats were out, bearing hard words for his services. Repeatedly was he admonished by Mr. Crumblejohn to recall where he came from, and other sour-faced remarks. As nobody knew his origin, least of all the boy himself, this might seem a useless question; but for Crumblejohn it held point in tending to depress any growth of self-esteem in Oliver, and was calculated to nip incipient ideas as to wages in the bud. “Little warmint what had nobody to chuck a crust to ’im, found in a furrer of a field. I gives ’im board, and I gives ’im bed, and I expects such-like to work for their wittels.” And work Oliver Charlock did, and not only at keg-rolling. When the vigilance of the authorities forbade the more usual signal of a fire being lit on some prominent point inland, he had been sent before now as emissary between the English smugglers, and Lambkin, in France. Lambkin was a man named Thurot. He was a Channel Islander, and you may read of him as rising to great prominence in the smuggling annals of his day. He was known also as O’Farrell, and was an Irish commodore in the French service for a time. He was but twenty-two when he met his death, yet he was a terror, we read, to the mercantile fleet of this kingdom. Whatever opinion we may hold as to his right or wrong doing, there is a light about his name, because he led a life of great romance, and daring.