"Ay, lass, that's how I left the fens of Lincolnshire a year last April
Fool's Day. There wasn't a dyke from, Lincoln town to Mablethorpe that I
hadn't crossed with a running jump; and there wasn't a break in the
shore, or a sink-hole in the sand, or a clump of rushes, or a samphire
bed, from Skegness to Theddlethorpe, that I didn't know like every line
of your face. And when I was a slip of a lad-ay, and later too--how you
and I used to snuggle into little nooks of the sand-hills, maybe just
beneath the coast-guard's hut, and watch the tide come swilling
in-water-daisies you used to call the breaking surf, Cousin Fanny. And
that was like you, always with a fancy about everything you saw. And when
the ships, the fishing-smacks with their red sails, and the tall-masted
brigs went by, taking the white foam on their canvas, you used to wish
that you might sail away to the lands you'd heard tell of from old
skippers that gathered round my uncle's fire in the Book-in-Hand. Ay, a
grand thing I thought it would be, too, to go riding round the world on a
well-washed deck, with plenty of food and grog, and maybe, by-and-by, to
be first mate, and lord it from fo'castle bunk to stern-rail.

"You did not know, did you, who was the coast-guardsman that stumbled as
he came on us that night? It looked a stupid thing to do that, and let
the lantern fall. But, lass, 'twas done o' purpose. That was the one man
in all the parish that would ha' risked his neck to let me free. 'Twas
Lancy Doane, who's give me as many beatings in his time as I him. We were
always getting foul one o' t'other since I was big enough to shy a bit of
turf at him across a dyke, and there isn't a spot on's body that I
haven't hit, nor one on mine that he hasn't mauled. I've sat on his head,
and he's had his knee in my stomach till I squealed, and we never could
meet without back-talking and rasping 'gainst the grain. The night before
he joined the coast-guardsmen, he was down at the Book-in-Hand, and 'twas