d well for a lieutenant's commission--the rule of the Service being
stretched now and then to favour these circumnavigating seamen, many of
whom worked their way aft from the hawse-hole to the quarter deck.
But my father and mother dying just then, and the former having slipped
a particular request into his will, Obed threw up the sea and settled
down in Vellingey as a quiet yeoman farmer.

Meanwhile, in 1779, I had entered the sea service of the Honourable East
India Company; and with passable good fortune had risen in it pretty
fast. Enough to say, that by the spring of 1796 I was looking forward
to the command of a ship. Just then my fortune deserted me. In a
sudden fear of French invasion, our Government bought the four new ships
which the Company had building (and a bad bargain they proved).
This put a stop for the time to all chance of promotion; and a sharp
attack of jaundice falling on top of my disappointments, I took the
usual decrease of pay and the Board's promise to remember my services on
a proper occasion, and hauled ashore to Vellingey for a holiday and a
thorough refit of health.

I believe that the eight or nine following months which Obed and I spent
together were the happiest in our two lives. He was glad enough to
shoulder off the small business of the farm and turn--as I have seen so
many men play, in a manner, at the professions they have given over--to
his favourite amusement of sounding the coast of Vellingey and
correcting the printed charts. He kept a small lugger mainly for this
purpose, and plied her so briskly that he promised to know the
sea-bottom between Kelsey Head and Godrevy Rock better than his own
fields. As for me, after years of salt water and stumping decks, I
asked nothing better than to steer a plough and smell broken soil, and
drowse after supper in an armchair, with good tobacco and Obed for
company.

In this way we passed the winter of 1796-7; until the lambing season,
which fell midway in February. The year opened wet, with fresh south
westerly winds, which in the second week chopped suddenly; and for four
days a continuous freezing gale blew on us from the N.W. It was then
that the lambs began to drop; and for three nights I exchanged pipe and
fireside for a lantern and the lower corner of Friar's Parc at the back
of the towans, where the ewes were gathered in the lew.[1] They kept us
so busy that for forty-eight hours we neither changed our clothes (at
least, I