he buoy adrift."

"You are right, my lad, that must be done immediately," said the
proprietor; "but now you had better go down with Sarah into the kitchen;
cook will take care of you. Sarah, my love, take him down to cook."

The little girl beckoned me to follow her. I was astonished at the
length and variety of the _companion-ladders_, for such I considered the
stairs, and was at last landed below, when little Sarah, giving cook the
injunction to take care of me, again tripped lightly up to her mother.

I found the signification of "take care of any one" very different on
shore from what it was on the river, where taking care of you means
getting out of your way, and giving you a wide berth; and I found the
shore reading much more agreeable. Cook did take care of me; she was a
kind-hearted, fat woman who melted at a tale of woe, although the fire
made no impression on her. I not only beheld, but I devoured, such
things as never before entered into my mouth or my imagination. Grief
had not taken away my appetite. I stopped occasionally to cry a little,
wiped my eyes, and sat down again. It was more than two hours before I
laid down my knife, and not until strong symptoms of suffocation played
round the regions of my trachea did I cry out, "Hold, enough." Somebody
has made an epigram about the vast ideas which a miser's horse must have
had of corn. I doubt, if such ideas were existent, whether they were at
all equal to my astonishment at a leg of mutton. I never had seen such
a piece of meat before, and wondered if it were fresh or otherwise.
After such reflection I naturally felt inclined to sleep; in a few
minutes I was snoring upon two chairs, cook having covered me up with
her apron to keep away the flies. Thus was I fairly embarked upon a new
element to me--my mother earth; and it may be just as well to examine
now into the capital I possessed for my novel enterprise. In person I
was well-looking; I was well-made, strong, and active. Of my
habiliments the less said the better; I had a pair of trousers with no
seat to them; but this defect, when I stood up, was hid by my jacket,
composed of an old waistcoat of my father's, which reached down as low
as the morning frocks worn in those days. A shirt of coarse duck, and a
fur cap, which was as rough and ragged as if it had been the hide of a
cat pulled to pieces by dogs, completed my attire. Shoes and stockings
I had none; these supernumerary appendages