"'Go, unfeeling man,' answered Mary, 'we will go with you. Bear with misfortune, my dear father, like a man. I will accompany you--take my arm. If I have hung upon yours with pride, upon more joyful occasions, it shall not be said that I was ashamed for you to rest upon mine, when they led you through the streets to a prison.' And she accompanied him to the place of confinement. "It was two days after old Danvers had been taken to prison, that the frigate into which William Stanley had been impressed made towards the land, and rode off the mouth of the Tyne, while a boat's crew were ordered on shore. Boatswain Rigby, apprehensive that William would request to be one of them, and that his request might be granted, had, previous to the boat leaving the vessel, sought to quarrel with him, and struck him; and requested of the lieutenant that, in consequence of the insolence he had used towards him, he should not be permitted to go on shore, but, as a punishment, placed on duty. "Poor Stanley was walking the deck, saying unto himself--'Refused permission to go ashore! Yes, Rigby! petty tyrant as thou art, thou shalt rue it! Refused a privilege that would have caused a slave to rebel, had he been denied it. But the time will come, when we shall meet upon terms of equality; and were his cowardice equal to his brutality--yea, were he shielded by a breast-plate hard as his own heart--my revenge shall find a passage through both; and his blood shall wash out the impression and the shame of the blow with which to-day he dared to smite me as a dog. The remembrance of that blow sticks as a dagger in my throat--its remembrance chokes me!' And, hurried on by the agitation of his feelings, he spoke aloud as he continued. 'Not only denied to set my foot upon the place of my nativity, but struck!--yes, struck like a hound, by a creature I despise! O memory!' he added, 'torture me not! Here, every remembered object strikes painfully on my eyeballs! The church and the church-yard, where my mother's body now mingles with the dust, are now before me, and I am prohibited from shedding a tear upon her grave. The banks of the Tyne, where I wandered with my Mary, while it sighed affection by our side, and the blue sea, which lay behind us, raising a song of love, are now visible--but though they are still beautiful, they are as beautiful things that lived and were loved, but that are now dead!' "In the intensity of his feelings he perceived not a boat which drew alongside; and, while he yet stood in a reverie, his old crony, Jack Jenkins, sprang on board, and, assisted by a waterman, raised Mary Danvers to the deck. "'Yonder he is,' exclaimed Jack, 'leaning over the gunwale, as melancholy as a merman making his last will and testament in the presence of his father Neptune.'