elow the little bluff along the East River above Fort
George.

There was a clump of wide beech-trees at that place, with a fine shade
and a place to lay their clothes while they swam about, splashing with
their naked white bodies in the water. At these times Master Barnaby
would bawl as lustily and laugh as loud as though his grandfather had
been the most honest ship-chandler in the town, instead of a
bloody-handed pirate who had been murdered in his sins.

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
True's earliest memories was a recollection of the good, kind gentleman
sitting in old Captain Brand's double-nailed arm-chair, the sunlight
shining across his knees, over which he had spread a great red silk
handkerchief, while he sipped a dish of tea with a dash of rum in it.
He kept up this habit of visiting the Widow True for a long time before
he could fetch himself to the point of asking anything more particular
of her, and