enough in them to Run the Great Risk! As on sea, so it is on land. That Ugly Halter dances before a man's eyes, and dazes him away from the Firmest Resolve. For how long will Schoolboys endure the hideous enormities of a Gnawbit before they come to the Supreme Revolt of a Barring-out! And for how long will a People suffer the mad tyranny of a Ruler, who outrages their Laws, who strangles their Liberties, who fleeces and squeezes and tramples upon them, before they take Heart of Grace, and up Pike and Musket, and down-derry-down with your Ruler, who is ordinarily the basest of Poltroons, and runs away in a fright so soon as the first Goose is bold enough to cry out that the Capitol _shall_ be saved! Nothing of this did I think aboard _The Humane Hopwood_. I was too young to have any thought at all, save of rage and anguish when it pleased Captain Handsell, being in a cheerful mood, to belabour me, till I was black and blue, with a rope's end. At the beginning of the voyage I was put into the hold, ironed, with the rest of the convicts, who were only permitted to come on deck twice a day, morning and evening, for a few Mouthfuls of Fresh air; who were fed on the vilest biscuit and the most putrid water, getting but a scrap of fat pork and a dram of Rum that was like Fire twice a week, and who were treated, generally, much like Negroes on the Middle Passage. But by and by,--say after ten days; but I took little account of Time in this floating Purgatory,--Captain Handsell had me unironed; and his cabin-boy, a poor weakly little lad, that could not stand much beating, being dead of that and a flux, and so thrown overboard without any more words being said about it--(he was but a little Scottish castaway from Edinburgh, who had been kidnapped late one night in the Grass Market, and sold to a Greenock skipper trading in that line for a hundred pound Scots--not above eight pounds of our currency)--and there is no Crowner's Quest at sea, I was promoted to the Vacant Post. I was Strong enough now, and the Wound in my side gave me no more pain; and I think I grew daily stronger and more hardened under the shower of blows which the Skipper very liberally dealt out to me; I hardly know with more plenitude when he was vexed, or when he was pleased. But I was not the same bleating little Lamb that the Wolfish Gnawbit used to torture. No, no; John Dangerous's apprenticeship had been useful to him. Even as college-lads graduate in their Latin and Greek, so I had graduated upon braining the Grenadier with the demijohn. I could take kicks and cuffs, but I could likewise give them. And so, as this Roaring Skipper made me a Block to vent his spite upon, I would struggle with, and bite, and kick his shins till sometimes we managed to fall together on the cabin-floor and tumble about there,--pull he, pull I, and a kick together!--till the Watch would look down the skylight upon us, grinning, and chuckle hoarsely that old Belzey, as they called