Ah! It is a fine thing to look back to the days when one was a boy!
Barnaby may remember how, often, when he and his companions were
paddling so in the water, the soldiers off duty would come up from the
fort and would maybe join them in the water, others, perhaps, standing
in their red coats on the shore, looking on and smoking their pipes of
tobacco.

Then there were other times when maybe the very next day after our hero
had fought with great valor with his fellows he would go a-rambling
with them up the Bouwerie Road with the utmost friendliness; perhaps to
help them steal cherries from some old Dutch farmer, forgetting in such
an adventure what a thief his own grandfather had been.

But to resume our story.

When Barnaby True was between sixteen and seventeen years old he was
taken into employment in the counting-house of his stepfather, Mr.
Roger Hartright, the well-known West Indian merchant, a most
respectable man and one of the kindest and best of friends that anybody
could have in the world.

This good gentleman had courted the favor of Barnaby's mother for a
long time before he had married her. Indeed, he had so courted her
before she had ever thought of marrying Jonathan True. But he not
venturing to ask her in marriage, and she being a brisk, handsome
woman, she chose the man who spoke out his mind, and so left the silent
lover out in the cold. But so soon as she was a widow and free again,
Mr. Hartright resumed his wooing, and so used to come down every
Tuesday and Friday evening to sit and talk with her. Among Barnaby