ioned above.

Apart from that, the story is quite good to read or to listen to, just
as Kingston books always are.

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BEN BURTON; OR, BORN AND BRED AT SEA, BY W H G KINGSTON.

CHAPTER ONE.

"Dick Burton, you're a daddy! Polly's been and got a baby for you, old
boy!" exclaimed several voices, as the said Dick mounted the side of the
old "Boreas," on the books of which ship he was rated as a
quarter-master, he having just then returned from a pleasant little
cutting-out expedition, where he had obtained, besides honour and glory,
a gash on the cheek, a bullet through the shoulder, and a prong from a
pike in the side.

"Me a what?" he inquired, bending his head forward with a look of
incredulity, and mechanically hitching up his trousers. "Me a daddy?
On course it's a boy? Polly wouldn't go for to get a girl, a poor
little helpless girl, out in these outlandish parts."

"On course, Dick, it's a boy, a fine big, walloping younker, too. Why
bless ye, Quacko ain't no way to be compared to him, especially when he
sings out, which he can do already, loud enough to drown the bo'sun's
whistle, let me tell you," was the reply to Dick Burton's last question.

That baby was me. Quacko was the monkey of the ship. I might not have
been flattered at being compared to him, though it must be owned that I
stood very much in the light of his rival. I soon, however, cut him out
completely. My mother was one of two women on board. The other was
Susan King, wife of another quarter-master. The two men enjoyed a
privilege denied to their captain, for they could take their wives to
sea, which he could not. To be sure, Polly and Susan made themselves
more generally useful than the captain's wife would probably have done
had she lived on board, for they washed and mended the men's shirts,
nursed them when sick or wounded, prepared lint and bandages for the
surgeons, and performed many other offices such as generally fall to the
lot of female hands. They had both endeared themselves to the men, by a
thousand kind and gentle acts, but my mother was decidedly the
favourite. This might have been because she was young and remarkably
handsome, and at the same time as good and modest as a woman could be;
and so discreet that she was never known to cause a quarrel among her
shipmates, or a pang of jealousy to her husband; and that, under the
circumstances of