is
quickly told. In shame of his brutal blow, as well as fear of his
wife's threat, he had stowed away in the hold of an English ship that
sailed the same night. Two days later famine had brought him out of
his hiding place, and he had been compelled to work before the mast.
In ten more days he had signed articles as able seaman at the first
English port of call. Then had followed punishments for sloth,
punishments for ignorance, and punishments for not knowing the
high-flavored language of his boatswain. After that had come
bickerings, threats, scowls, oaths, and open ruptures with this chief
of petty tyrants, ending with the blow of a marlin-spike over the big
Icelander's crown, and the little boatswain rolling headlong
overboard. Then had followed twenty-eight days spent in irons,
rivetted to the ship's side on the under deck, with bread and water
diet every second day and nothing between. Finally, by the secret
good fellowship of a shipmate with some bowels of compassion, escape
had come after starvation, as starvation had come after slavery, and
Stephen had swum ashore while his ship lay at anchor in Ramsey Bay.

What occurred thereafter at the house whereto he had drifted no one
could rightly tell. He continued to live there with the trull who
kept it. She had been the illegitimate child of an insolvent English
debtor and the daughter of a neighboring vicar, had been ignored by
her father, put out to nurse by her mother, bred in ignorance, reared
in impurity, and had grown into a buxom hussy. By what arts, what
hints, what appeals, what allurements, this trollop got possession of
Stephen Orry it is not hard to guess. First, he was a hunted man, and
only one who dare do anything dare open doors to him. Next, he was a
foreigner, dumb for speech, and deaf for scandal, and therefore
unable to learn more than his eyes could tell him of the woman who
had given him shelter. Then the big Icelander was a handsome fellow;
and the veriest drab that ever trailed a petticoat knows how to hide
her slatternly habits while she is hankering after a fine-grown man.
So the end of many conspiring circumstances was that after much
gossip in corners, many jeers, and some tossings of female heads, the
vicar of the parish, Parson Gell, called one day at the hut in
Port-y-Vullin, and on the following Sunday morning, at church, little
Robbie Christian, the clerk and sexton, read out the askings for the
marriage of Liza Killey, spinster, o