Yet, on the morrow, little Tom would go again. The father would have left him at home till the Spring strengthened and the sun came nearer, for it was but early March as yet; but the little adventurer was too true to his nature to accept the boon. And from that day, summer and winter, except when even the father himself was compelled to stay at home by reason of an unusual storm, Tom continued to mount his little red night-cap, like the rest, and make one among the picturesque line of industrious stragglers on the sea-beach. To school Tom never went in his life: though his lot would not have been more highly favoured in that respect, had he been the child of a peasant in the interior, or even the son of a decent mechanic in Lincolnshire, at that period,—for we are speaking of events of seventy years' date, from their commencement to our own time,—and at that far-back period the idea of sending a poor man's child to school was regarded as a piece of over-weening pride that deserved no gentle rebuke from "the better sort of people." But what though he could never read? he could make boats; and indeed his earliest error was a display of that kind of ingenuity, for he bored a hole in the bottom of his mother's bread-tin when but four years' old, stuck a wooden mast in it, fitted on a sail, and set it afloat on the surface of a brook that ran by the end of his father's little garden; and, while he clapped his little hands in ecstasy, away dashed his ship to the sea! He was severely chidden for this, but _not_ flogged: that was not his mother's way; she happened to have too much good sense to brutify her offspring: and the lecture served to shew him that he had done foolishly,—but it did not annihilate that passion for ships and the sea which his first sight of them had created within him. He could make boats—did we say? ay, and he made a ship, too,—such a ship!—though this was when he was ten years old, and had seen the magnificent merchant-vessels from the Mediterranean and the West Indies go by in full sail for the Humber and the port of Hull,—such a ship, with masts, and yards, and rigging, and portholes, and even miniature sailors,—it was so wondrous a piece of art as the oldest villager in Northcotes had never seen, and rendered little Tom the every-day talk of all its inhabitants. Such talk did not render little Tom vain, however, for his yearning mind had influenced his hands to form the ship from no principle of praise-seeking: it was a type that signified he meant to sail in such an ocean-vehicle—if the simple people could so have read it.