Having done my duty thus, I found a bracing strength upon me to go through with everything. No man should know how much I felt my violent degradation from being captain of a gun, to have to tread mercantile boards! Things have changed since then so much, through the parsimony of Government, that our very best sailors now tail off into the Merchant service. But it was not so, when I was young; and even when I was turned of fifty, we despised the traders. Even the largest of their vessels, of four or as much as five hundred tons, we royal tars regarded always as so many dust-bins with three of the clothes-props hoisted. And now, as I looked in the glass, I beheld no more than the mate of a fifty-ton ketch, for a thirty-mile voyage out of Newton bay! However, I had lived long enough then to be taught one simple thing. Whatever happens, one may descry (merely by using manly aspect) dawning glimpses of that light which the will of God intended to be joy for all of us; but so scattered now and vapoured by our own misdoings, still it will come home some time, and then we call it "comfort." Accordingly, though so deeply fallen in my own regard, I did not find that people thought so very much the less of me. Nay, some of them even drove me wild, by talking of my "rise in life," as if I had been a pure nobody! But on the whole we learned my value, when I was going away from us. For all the village was stirred up with desire to see the last of me. My well-known narratives at the well would be missed all through the autumn; and those who had dared to call them "lies," were the foremost to feel the lack of them. Especially the children cried "Old Davy going to be drownded! No more stories at the well!" Until I vowed to be back almost before they could fill their pitchers. These things having proved to me, in spite of inordinate modesty, that I had a certain value, I made the very best of it; and let everybody know how much I wished to say "Good-bye" to them, although so short of money. From "Felix Farley" I had received no less than seven-and-tenpence--for saving the drowned black people--under initials "D. L." at the office; accruing to a great extent from domestic female servants. Some of these craved my candid opinion as to accepting the humble addresses of coloured gentlemen in good livery, and whether it made so much difference. And now I thought that Newton might have a mark of esteem prepared for me.