did the high and mighty airs Sir Richard and
my lady chose to assume in their dealings with the citizens win
them many friends; so that when it became known, about the time
when Dick left Cambridge finally, without a degree, that his father
had suffered serious reverses of fortune in his adventures in
oversea trade, there were few who felt anything but satisfaction.

At this time I was midway in my seventeenth year--a big strapping
fellow standing five feet ten, having quite outgrown the delicacy
of my childhood. I was high up in the school, on good terms with
the masters, though my Latin and Greek was never considerable: on
better terms with the boys, for, I must own, my inclinations were
rather towards baseball and quoits than towards the nice
discrimination of longs and shorts. I had developed in particular
an amazing strength of arm, which stood me in good stead in
wrestling bouts, and led to my being counted two in our tugs of
war. It was this same strength, I fancy, that made my schoolfellows
chary of provoking me to wrath, for which I was somewhat sorry,
having always loved a fight.

During these years no tidings came to us of Joe Punchard. His poor
mother, who earned a living by washing for some of our Shrewsbury
folk, feared the worst from his long silence. But Mistress Nelly
Hind, who kept a coffee shop in Raven Street, called Mistress
Punchard a croaker and bade her be of good cheer, for she had
neither seen nor directly heard from her brother John Benbow for
twenty years; yet he was alive and well, and captain of a king's
ship, if rumor were not a false, lying jade.

"Not that your Joe will ever rise to such a height," she added.

"Sure he's a better boy than ever your John was," said Mistress
Punchard, up in arms for her offspring.

"John's legs are as straight as the bed post," retorted his sister,
and then the two women began a war of words, in the midst of which,
having drunk my dish of coffee, I slipped away.

I rarely speculated on my future, and my father never spoke of it.
We took it for granted that I should succeed him in his little
property, and during the school holidays I sometimes accompanied
him to market, and learned to handle samples of grain and to
discuss the points of his fat cattle.

It was when I was approaching the end of my seventeenth year that I
began to think of the future more nearly. My father had suffered
long--though Mistress Pennyquick and I had known nothing of it,