A few years previous to the period in which our tale opens, an event
occurred which altered the course of Captain Ellice's life, and for a
long period plunged him into the deepest affliction. This was the loss
of his wife at sea under peculiarly distressing circumstances.

At the age of thirty Captain Ellice had married a pretty blue-eyed girl,
who resolutely refused to become a sailor's bride unless she should be
permitted to accompany her husband to sea. This was without much
difficulty agreed to, and forthwith Alice Bremner became Mrs. Ellice,
and went to sea. It was during her third voyage to the West Indies that
our hero Fred was born, and it was during this and succeeding voyages
that Buzzby became "all but a wet-nurse" to him.

Mrs. Ellice was a loving, gentle, seriously-minded woman. She devoted
herself, heart and soul to the training of her boy, and spent many a
pleasant hour in that little, unsteady cabin in endeavouring to instil
into his infant mind the blessed truths of Christianity, and in making
the name of Jesus familiar to his ear. As Fred grew older his mother
encouraged him to hold occasional intercourse with the sailors--for her
husband's example taught her the value of a bold, manly spirit, and she
knew that it was impossible for her to instil _that_ into him--but she
was careful to guard him from the evil that he might chance to learn
from the men, by committing him to the tender care of Buzzby. To do the
men justice, however, this was almost unnecessary, for they felt that a
mother's watchful eye was on the child, and no unguarded word fell from
their lips while he was romping about the forecastle.

When it was time for Fred to go to school, Mrs. Ellice gave up her
roving life and settled in her native town of Grayton, where she resided
with her widowed sister, Amelia Bright, and her niece Isobel. Here Fred