It was a dull week that young Cockle Tom passed at home; for, despite his enthusiasm, the complete separation from his parents was a thought that cut him to the quick. Did, then, the fisherman's child, who had been led forth to endure the cold sea wind, and labour, and hunger, from infancy, love his parents? Ay, that did he, and with such a love as you know nothing of, young spruce, who have been to boarding-school, and have since become versed in all the hollownesses of "respectable life." If there was a sacred corner in Tom's heart, it was that where the precious images of his father and mother were enshrined. Toil, fatigue, hunger, pain, loss of sleep, nay, death itself, he would have encountered at any moment to benefit them; and, young as he was, he formed strong judgments on men's characters who failed in parental duty. He never swore but once in his life, before leaving home, and that was when a young farmer in the parish married a flaunting wife, and gave up his aged father, blind and palsy-stricken, to be placed in an alms-house. "D—n his eyes!" exclaimed young Tom, while his own eyes flashed fire, "I should like to grapple his weasand, as big as he is!" That was a rude expression, and a strange one, too, for a boy of fourteen; but while his mother reproved it with such a look as she had never given him before,—and he blushed like scarlet, and promised, with tears in his eyes, never to swear again,—yet she read within Tom's heart, by the aid of those few syllables, the existence of a principle which, she felt, more truly ennobled her child than the highest earthly titles would have aggrandised him. It was some relief to young Tom to reflect that his parents were now in comparatively comfortable circumstances, and chiefly through his means. The ice of timidity once broken, Jack had become more adventurous, and within one year, by the joint efforts of the two brothers, so great an increase took place in the fish the father had to offer for sale, that he was enabled to buy the little cottage in which he lived, with the garden adjoining, as well as to clothe his whole family. The next year furnished a new and larger boat, and an extra horse, besides stocking the little purse of the father with a few spare guineas in gold—the noble old spade-aces which "looked so much like _real_ money," as our forefathers used to say, when they first saw the queer, "fly-away-blow-away" paper money.