“Yon wild mossy mountains sae lofty and wide,
    That nurse in their bosom the youth of the Clyde,
Where the grouse lead their coveys thro’ the heather to feed,
And the shepherd tends his flocks as he pipes on his reed.
    Not Gowrie’s rich valley, nor Forth’s sunny shores,
    To me hae the charm o’ yon wild mossy moors.”

Burns.

Scene: The parlour of an old-fashioned hotel in the Scottish Highlands. It is the afternoon of an autumn day; a great round-topped mountain, though some distance off, quite overshadows the window. This window is open, and the cool evening breeze is stealing in, laden with the perfume of the honeysuckle which almost covers a solitary pine tree close by. There is the drowsy hum of bees in the air, and now and then the melancholy lilt of the yellow-hammer – last songster of the season. Two gentlemen seated at dessert. For a time both are silent. They are thinking.

“Say, Lyle,” says one at last, “you have been staring unremittingly at the purple heather on yon hill-top for the last ten minutes, during which time, my friend, you haven’t spoken one word.”

Lyle laughed quietly, and cracked a walnut.

“Do you see,” he said, “two figures going on and on upwards through the heather yonder?”

“I see what I take to be a couple of blue-bottle flies creeping up a patch of crimson.”

“Those blue-bottles are our boys.”

“How small they seem!”

“Yet how plucky! That hill, Fitzroy, is precious nearly a mile in height above the sea-level, and it is a good ten miles’ climb to the top of it. They have the worst of it before them, and they haven’t eaten a morsel since morning, but I’ll wager the leg of the gauger they won’t give in.”

“Well, Lyle, our boys are chips of the old blocks, so I won’t take your bet. Besides, you know, I am an Englishman, and though I know the gauger is a kind of Scottish divinity, I was unaware you could take such liberties with his anatomy as to wager one of his legs.”

“Seriously talking now, Fitzroy, we are here all alone by our two selves, though our sons are in sight; has the question ever occurred to you what we are to do with our boys?”

“No,” said Fitzroy, “I haven’t given it a thought. Have you?”

“Well, I have, one or two; for my lad, you know, is big enough to make his father look old. He is fifteen, and yours is a year or two more.”

“They’ve had a good education,” said Fitzroy, reflectively.

“True, true; but how to turn it to account?”

“Send them into the army or navy. Honour and glory, you know!”

Lyle laughed.

“Honour and glory! Eh? Why, you and I, Fitzroy, have had a lot of that. Much good it has done us. I have a hook for a hand.”

“And I have a wooden leg,” said Fitzroy, “and that is about all I have to leave my lad, for I don’t suppose they bury a fellow with his wooden leg on. Well, anyhow, that is my boy’s legacy; he can hang it behind the door in the library, and when he has company he can point to it sadly, and say, ‘Heigho, that’s all that is left of poor father!’”

“Yes,” said Lyle; “and he can also tell the story of the forlorn hope you led when you won that wooden toe. No, Fitzroy, honour and glory won’t do, now that the war is over. It was all very well when you and I were boys.”

“Well, there is medicine, the law, and the church, and business, and farming, and what-not.”

“Now, my dear friend, which of those on your list do you think your boy would adopt?”

“Well,” replied Fitzroy, with a smile, “I fear it would be the ‘what-not.’”

“And mine, too. Our lads have too much spirit for anything very tame. There is the blood of the old fighting Fitzroys in your boy’s veins, and the blood of the restless, busy Lyles in Leonard’s. If you hadn’t lost nearly all your estates, and if I were rich, it would be different, wouldn’t it, my friend?”

“Yes, Lyle, yes.”

Fitzroy jumped up immediately afterwards, and stumped round the room several times, a way he had when thinking.

Then he stopped in front of his friend.

“Bother it all, Lyle,” he said; “I think I have it.”

“Well,” quoth Lyle, “let us hear it.”

Then Fitzroy sat down and drew his chair close to Lyle’s.

“We love our boys, don’t we?”

“Rather!”

“And we have only one each?”

“No more.”

“Well, your estate is encumbered?”

“It’s all in a heap.”

“So is mine, but in a few years both may be clear.”

“Yes, please God, unless, you know, my old pike turns his sides up – ha! ha!”

“Well, what I propose is this. Let our lads have their fling for a bit.”

“What! appoint a tutor to each of them, and let them make the grand tour, see a bit of Europe, and then settle down?”

“Bother tutors and your grand tour! How would we have liked at their age to have had tutors hung on to us?”

“Well, Lyle, we might have had tutors, but I’ll be bound we would have been masters.”

“Yes. Well, boys will be boys, and I know nothing would please our lads better than seeing the world; so suppose we say to them, We can afford you a hundred or two a year if you care to go and see a bit of life, and don’t lose yourselves, what do you think they would reply?”

“I don’t know exactly what they would reply, but I know they would jump at the offer, and put us down as model parents. But then, we have their mothers to consult.”

“Well, consult them, but put the matter very straight and clear before their eyes. Explain to our worthy wives that boys cannot always be in leading strings, that the only kind of education a gentleman can have to fit him for the battle of life, is that which he gains from his experience in roughing it and in rubbing shoulders with the wide world.”

“Good; that ought to fetch them.”

“Yes; and we may add that after a young man has seen the world, he is more likely to settle down, and lead a quiet respectable life at home.”

“As a country squire!”

“Oh yes; country squire will do, and we might throw Parliament in, eh? Member for the county – how does that sound?”

Major Lyle laughed.

And Captain Fitzroy laughed.

Then they both rubbed their hands and looked pleased.

“I think,” said Fitzroy, “we have it all cut and dry.”

“There isn’t a doubt of it.”

“Well, then, we’ll order the lads’ dinner in – say in three hours’ time, and you and I will meanwhile have a stroll.”

In about three hours both Leonard and his friend Douglas Fitzroy returned to the inn, as hungry as Highland hunters, and were glad to see the table groaning with good things.

“We’ve had such a day of it, dad,” said Leonard; “though we had no idea of the distance when we started, but I’ve found some of the rarest ferns and mountain flora, and some of the rarest coleoptera in all creation. Haven’t we, Doug?”

“Yes, Leon. Your sister will be delighted.”

“Dear Eff!” said Leonard; “I wish she’d been with us.”

It was a grand walking expedition the two young gentleman and their fathers were on, and it is wonderful how Captain Fitzroy did swing along with that wooden leg of his. He was always in front, whether it was going up hill or down dell. There really seems some advantage, after all, in having a wooden leg, for once an angry adder struck the gallant captain on the “timber toe,” as he called it; and once a bulldog flew at him, and though it rent some portion of his clothing, it could make no impression to signify on that wooden leg, and finally received a kick on the jaw that made it retire to its kennel in astonishment.

After they had dined Captain Fitzroy explained the travelling scheme to the lads, and recommended them to think seriously about it after they had retired to their bedroom, and give their answer in the morning.

I do not think there is any occasion to say what that answer was when the morning came.

Book Two – Chapter Two
At Sea in the “Fairy Queen.”

“Oh! who can tell save he whose heart hath tried,
And danced in triumph o’er the waters wide,
The exalting sense – the pulse’s maddening play,
That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way?”

Byron.

“The moon is up; it is a lovely eve;
Long streams of light o’er dancing waves expand.”

Idem.

Scene: The deck of the Fairy Queen. Douglas and Leonard walking slowly up and down the quarter-deck arm-in-arm. Hardly a cloud in the sky, stars very bright, and a round moon rising in the east and gilding the waters.

Three years have elapsed since the conversation related in the last chapter took place – years that have not been thrown away, for our heroes – by that title we ought now to know them – have been sensible and apt pupils in the world’s great school.

It must be admitted that it was both a strange and an unusual thing for two fathers, to each make his only son an allowance, and tell him to go and enjoy himself in any way he pleased. After all, it was only treating boys as men, and this, in my opinion, ought to be done more often than it is.

They drew their first half-year’s income in London, then went quietly away to their hotel to consider what they should do.

“A couple of hundred a year, Doug,” said Leonard, “isn’t a vast fortune.”

“No,” replied Douglas, “it isn’t unspendable.”

“That is what I was thinking. But you see, by making us this grant – and it is all they can afford, and very handsome of them – we are positively on parole, aren’t we?”

“Yes, we are bound not to exceed. To do so would be most unkind and ungentlemanly.”

“Well, if we go on the continent it won’t last long, will it?”

“No; besides, I don’t hanker after the continent. My French is shocking bad, Leon, and I should be sure to quarrel with somebody, and get run through the body. No; the continent is out of the question.”

“Yes; although a fellow could pick up some nice specimens there. But let us go farther afield. We can’t go abroad far as passengers – suppose we go as sailors? We both have been to Norway in a ship, and we went together to Archangel, so there isn’t much about a ship we don’t know. Let us, I say, offer our services as – ”

“As what?”

“Why, as apprentices. We’re not much too old.”

“No.”

“Well, is it agreed?”

“Yes, I’m ready for anything, Leon. I want to see the world at any price.”

So the very next day off they had gone to see an old friend of Captain Fitzroy’s who lived down Greenwich way, and who was a city merchant in a big way of business.

They explained their wishes and ambitions to him.

“Well,” he replied, “come and dine with me to-morrow, and I’ll introduce you to one of the jolliest old salts that ever crossed the ocean. I’ll do no more than introduce you, mind that.”

Nor did he.

But after dinner Captain Blunt, a thorough seaman every inch of him, with a face as rosy and round as the rising moon, began spinning yarns, or telling his experiences. He had ready listeners in Leonard and Douglas, and when the former opened out, as he phrased it, and introduced and expatiated on the subject next his heart and the heart of his friend, it was Captain Blunt’s turn to listen.

“Bother me, boys!” he exclaimed at last, pitching away the end of a big cigar, “but I think you are good-hearted ones, through and through, and if I thought it was something more than a passing fancy I’d take you along with me.”

“Take us and try us. We want no wages till we can earn them, nor will we live aft till we are fit to keep a watch. Our station on deck must be before the mast, our place below a seat before the galley fire, and a bunk or hammock amidships. We want to learn to set a sail, to splice a rope, to heave the lead, box the compass, turn the capstan, reef and steer – in fact, all a sailor’s duties.”

“Bravo!” cried Captain Blunt, “I’m but a plain man, and a plain outspoken sailor, but I’ll have you; and if there isn’t some life and go in you, blame me, but I’m no reader of character.”

That is the way – an unusual one, I grant – in which our heroes joined the merchant service, and here – after three years all spent in Captain Blunt’s ship – here, I say, on this lovely night, we find them both on deck, one keeping his watch, the other keeping him company, for they are having a talk about bygone times.

They have seen a bit of life even in that time, for the good ship Fairy Queen was seldom long out of active service.

They kept strictly to the terms of their engagement, and have been till now before the mast, refusing even to mess in the cabin, although invited to do so by kindly old Captain Blunt.

Both Douglas Fitzroy and Leonard Lyle were, as mere children, fond of the sea. What British boy is not? A ship had always had a strange fascination for each of them. When much younger they had often been taken by their parents to Glasgow, and they preferred a stroll among the shipping at the Broomielaw to even a saunter in the park itself. Beautiful in summer though the park might have been in those days – and there was but one – it was in Leonard’s eyes too artificial. The lad loved Nature, but he liked to meet her and to woo her in the woods and wilds.

At school in Edinburgh both boys were what are called inseparables. They just suited each other. It was not a case of extremes meet, however, for the tastes of both were identical. Although their books and lessons had by no means been neglected, still, task duty over, and off their minds for the day, they were free to follow the bent of their own wills. More beautiful or more romantic scenery than that close around Scotland’s capital there is hardly to be found anywhere. Our heroes knew every nook and corner of it, every hill and dell, every dingle, rock, and glen, and all the creatures that dwelt therein, whether clad in fur or feather. But for all that, they were as well known on the pier of Leith as “Mutchkin Jock,” the gigantic shore-porter, himself was. Never a ship worth the name of ship had entered, while they were at school, that they did not visit, scan, and criticise. They coolly invited themselves on board, too. Now this might have been resented at times had they not been gentlemanly lads. Gentlemanly in address, I mean. So, though they might often and often have been found “yarning” with sailors forward, whose hearts they well knew how to win, they were just as often invited down below to the cabin, and hobnobbed with the captain himself.

It would have pleased the surliest old ship captain who ever peeped over a binnacle edge, to have two such listeners as young Leon and Doug. How their bright eyes had sparkled, to be sure, as some skipper newly or lately arrived from foreign lands sat telling them of all the wonders he had seen! And how they had longed to sail away to summer seas, and behold for themselves wonders on a larger scale than any they could meet with among the mountains of their own country!

It was thus perhaps that a taste for wandering and a fondness for the sea had been engendered early in the breast of each of the boys.

It was this, I’m sure, that caused them once to write home to their respective parents, informing them that the 250-ton brig, Highland Donald, was to sail in a fortnight for Norway and the Baltic, and that the skipper had offered to take them if they could obtain permission.

Permission had been granted, and having been provided with suits of rough warm clothing, they had embarked one fine spring morning, and sailed away for the cold north.

Now, if any young reader thinks he would like to be a sailor, and has been led to believe, from books or otherwise, that a seaman’s life is one of unmitigated pleasure and general jollity, let him induce his father or guardian to place him on a grain, tar, or timber ship bound for Norway or the Baltic. If, after a month or two of such a life, he still believes in the joys of a seaman’s existence, let him join the merchant service forthwith, but I fear there are few lads who would come up smiling after so severe a test.

Our heroes, however, had stood this test, though they had roughed it in no ordinary way. True, they had been all but shipwrecked on an iron-bound coast, where no boat could have lived a minute; they had been in gale of wind after gale of wind; their provisions and fare had been of the coarsest; their beds were always wet or damp, and sometimes the cold had been intense, depressing, benumbing to both mind and body.

But their long voyage north had made sailors of them for all that, and that is saying a very great deal. It had proved of what mettle they were made, and given them confidence in themselves.

This is the first voyage, then, in which Leonard and Douglas have trod the deck as officers, and I do not deny that both are just a trifle proud of their position, although they feel fully the weight of responsibility the buttons have brought. They certainly took but little pride in the uniform which they wore, as some weak-minded lads would have done, albeit handsome they both had looked, as they sat at table on that last night at Grayling House. So, at all events, Leonard’s mother and poor Effie thought. The latter had done little else but cry all the day, that is, whenever she could get a chance of doing so unseen. This was the second time only that her brother and brother’s friend had been home since they went to sea for good. They had stayed at home for a whole month, and now were bound on a perilous cruise indeed, sailing far away to Arctic seas, Captain Blunt’s ship having been chosen to take stores and provisions out to Greenland for vessels employed in finding out the North-West Passage.

Something had seemed to whisper to Effie that she would never see her darling brother again. So no wonder her heart had been sad, and her eyes red with weeping, as our heroes left; or that a gloom, like the gloom of the grave, had fallen on Grayling House, as soon as they were gone.

Great old Ossian had come and put his head on her lap, and gazing up into her face with those brown speaking eyes of his, and his loving looks of pity, almost broke her heart. The tears had come fast enough then.

The Fairy Queen had sailed from Leith. Both parents had accompanied their sons thus far, and blessed them and given them Bibles each (it is a way they have in Scotland on such occasions), and bade them a hearty good-bye.

Yes, it was a hearty good-bye to all outward appearance, but there was a lump in Leonard’s throat all the same that he had a good deal of difficulty in swallowing; and as soon as the Fairy Queen was out of sight, the two fathers had left the pier – not side by side, remark we, but one in front of the other, Indian-file fashion. Why not side by side? Well, for this reason. There was a moisture in Major Fitzroy’s eyes, that, being a man, he was somewhat ashamed of, so he stumped on ahead, that Captain Lyle might not notice his weakness; and between you and me, reader, Captain Lyle, for some similar reason, was not sorry. I hope you quite understand it.

However, here on this beautiful summer’s night, with a gentle beam wind blowing from the westward, we find our friends on deck. There is a crowd of sail on her, and the ship lies away to the west of the Shetland Islands. They do not mean to touch there, so give the rocks a good offing.

Save for the occasional flapping of the sails or a footstep on deck, there is not a sound to break the solemn stillness.

They did encounter a gale of wind, however, shortly after leaving Leith, but the good ship stood it well, and it had not lasted long.

“I say, old fellow,” said Leonard, “hadn’t you better turn in? I think I would if I had a chance.”

“No, I don’t feel sleepy; I’m more inclined to continue our pleasant chat. Pleasant chat on a pleasant night, with every prospect of a pleasant voyage, eh?”

“I think so. Of course good weather cannot last for ever.”

“No, and then there is the ice.”

“Well, now, I’m not afraid of that. Remember, I superintended the fortifying of the ship, and you could hardly believe how solid we are. But of course ice will go through anything.”

“So I’ve heard, and we saw some bergs while coming round the Horn – didn’t we? – that I wouldn’t care to be embraced between.”

“Not unless the ship were made of indiarubber, and everybody in it.”

“I wonder how all are at Grayling House to-night. Poor sister Effie! Didn’t she cry! I’m afraid old Peter was croaking a bit. He is quite one of the family, you know, but very old-wifeish and crotchety, and thinks himself quite an old relation of father’s. Then there is that ridiculous superstition about the pike.”

“Yes, do you know the story?”

“Yes, and I may relate it some evening, perhaps, what little story there is; though it is only ridiculous nonsense. But look! what is that?”

“Why, a shoal of porpoises, but they are just like fishes of fire.”

“Phosphorescence. These seas on some summer nights are all alive with it. What a lovely sight! Strange life the creatures lead! I wonder do they ever sleep? Heigho! talking of sleep makes me think of my hammock. I believe I will turn in now, though it is really a pity to go below on so lovely a night. Ta, ta. Take care of us all.

“A Dios, Leonard.”

Yes, it was indeed a lovely night; but, ah! quickly indeed do scene and weather change at sea.