In course of time the sailor boy, despite of hardship and rough usage, grew up into a singularly robust and active man, not above the middle size,--for his height never exceeded five feet eight inches,--but broad-shouldered, deep-chested, strong-limbed, and so compact of bone and muscle, that in a ship of the line, in which he afterwards sailed, there was not, among five hundred able-bodied seamen, a man who could lift so great a weight, or grapple with him on equal terms. His education had been but indifferently cared for at home: he had, however, been taught to read by a female cousin, a niece of his mother's, who, like her too, was both the daughter and the widow of a sailor; and for his cousin's only child, a girl somewhat younger than himself, he had contracted a boyish affection, which in a stronger form continued to retain possession of him after he grew up. In the leisure thrown on his-hands in long Indian and Chinese voyages, he learned to write; and profited so much by the instructions of a comrade, an intelligent and warm-hearted though reckless Irishman, that he became skilful enough to keep a log-book, and to take a reckoning with the necessary correctness,--accomplishments far from common at the time among ordinary sailors. He formed, too, a taste for reading. The recollection of his cousin's daughter may have influenced him, but he commenced life with a determination to rise in it,--made his first money by storing up instead of drinking his grog,--and, as was common in those times, drove a little trade with the natives of foreign parts in articles of curiosity and vertu, for which, I suspect, the custom-house dues were not always paid. With all his Scotch prudence, however, and with much kindliness of heart and placidity of temper there was some wild blood in his veins, derived, mayhap, from one or two buccaneering ancestors, that, when excited beyond the endurance point, became sufficiently formidable; and which, on at least one occasion, interfered very considerably with his plans and prospects.