ncidences in this story, but that's part
of the fun.

________________________________________________________________________

PETER TRAWL, THE ADVENTURES OF A WHALER, BY W.H.G. KINGSTON.

CHAPTER ONE.

MY EARLY DAYS AT HOME.

Brother Jack, a seaman's bag over his shoulders, trudged sturdily ahead;
father followed, carrying the oars, spars, sails, and other gear of the
wherry, while as I toddled alongside him I held on with one hand to the
skirt of his pea-jacket, and griped the boat-hook which had been given
to my charge with the other.

From the front of the well-known inn, the "Keppel's Head," the portrait
of the brave old admiral, which I always looked at with awe and
admiration, thinking what a great man he must have been, gazed sternly
down on us as we made our way along the Common Hard of Portsea towards
the water's edge.

Father and Jack hauled in the wherry, and having deposited their burdens
in her, set to work to mop her out and to put her to rights, while I
stood, still grasping the boat-hook, which I held upright with the point
in the ground, watching their proceedings, till father, lifting me up in
his arms, placed me in the stern-sheets.

"Sit there, Peter, and mind you don't topple overboard, my son," he
said, in the kind tone in which he always spoke to me and Jack.

I was too small to be of much use, indeed father had hitherto only taken
me with him when he was merely going across to Gosport and back or
plying about the harbour.

It was a more eventful day to Jack than to me. When I saw mother
packing his bag, I had a sort of idea that he was going to sea, and when
the next morning she threw her arms round his neck and burst into tears,
and Jack began to cry too, I understood that he would be away for a long
time.

Jack had been of great use to father, who grieved as much as mother to
part with him, but, as he said, he wouldn't, if he could help it, bring
him up as a long-shore lubber, and a few voyages would be the making of
him.

"He can't get none of the right sort of eddication on shore," observed
father. "He'll learn on board a man-of-war what duty and discipline
mean, and to my mind till a lad knows that he isn't worth his salt."

The _Lapwing_ brig-of-war, fitted out at Sheerness, had brought up at
Spithead, and her commander, Captain Rogers, with whom father had long
served, meeting him on shore, and hearing that he had a son old enough
to go to sea, offered to take Jack