ry about
all the sailors throwing up their caps and huzzaing for Sir Edward,
the merciful man.'

The fisherman smiles and nods. He puts his arm more tenderly than ever
round his small daughter as he says, 'Ay, ay, dear heart, never thou
fear.' Then, drawing Margery closer to him, he begins his tale. It is
a long story. The sun has set; the crescent moon has disappeared; and
the stars are stealing out, one by one, before he has finished. I wish
you and I could listen to that story, don't you? Well, we can! Someone
who heard it from the fisherman's own lips has written it all down for
us. He is telling it to us in his own words to-day, as he told it to
those children in Scarborough village long ago.

Now and then we must interrupt him to explain some of the words he
uses, or even alter the form of the sentences slightly, in order fully
to understand what it is he is talking about.

But he is telling his own story.

'My name,' begins the fisherman, 'is Richard Sellar. It was during the
war between the Dutch and English that I was pressed at Scarborough in
1665.'

'Pressed' means that he was forced to go and fight against his will.
When the country is in danger men are obliged to leave their peaceful
employments and learn to be soldiers and sailors, in order, as they
think, to defend their own nation by trying to kill their enemies. It
is something like what people now call 'conscription' that Richard
Sellar is talking of when he speaks of 'being pressed.' He means that
a number of men, called a 'press-crew,' forced him to go with them to
fight in the king's navy, for, as the proverb said, 'A king's ship and
the gallows refuse nobody.'

'I was pressed,' Richard continues, 'within Scarborough Piers, and
refusing to go on board the ketch [or boat] they beat me very sore,
and I still refusing, they hoisted me in with a tackle on board, and
they bunched me with their feet, that I fell backward into a tub, and
was so maimed that they were forced to swaddle me up with clothes.'

Richard Sellar could not help himself. Bound, bruised, and beaten he
was carried off in the boat to be taken to a big fighting ship called
the _Royal Prince_, that was waiting for them off the mouth of the
Thames and needing more sailors to man her for the war.

The press-crew however had not captured enough men at Scarborough, so
they put in at another Yorkshire port, spelled Burlington then but
Bridlington now. It was that same Burlington or B