with great zeal, while I, having slipped under the keel of a
trading-ketch and climbed on board by her accommodation-ladder
dangling on the far side, watched them from behind a stack of
flower-pots on her deck. When they desisted, and I had seen the
culprit first treated as a leper by the crowd, then haled before two
constables and examined at length, finally led homeward by the ear
and cuffed at every few steps by his mother (a widow), I slipped back
into the water, dived back under the ketch, and, emerging, asked the
cause of the disturbance. This made a new reputation for me, at the
expense of some emotion to Mrs. Trapp, to whom the news of my decease
had been borne on the swiftest wings of rumour.

But I have tarried too long over those days of my apprenticeship, and
am yet only at the beginning. Were there no story to be told, I
might fill a chapter by fishing up recollections of Plymouth in those
days; of the women, for instance, carried down in procession to the
Barbican and ducked for scolding. A husband had but to go before the
Mayor (Mr. Trapp sometimes threatened it) and swear that his wife was
a common scold, and the Mayor gave him an order to hoist her on a
horse and take her to the ducking-chair to be dipped thrice in Sutton
Pool. At last a poor creature died of it, and that put an end to the
bad business. Then there were the press-gangs. Time and again I
have run naked from bathing to watch the press as, after hunting from
tavern to tavern, it dragged a man off screaming to the steps, the
sailors often man-handling him and the officer joking with the crowd
and behaving as cool and gentlemanly as you please. Mr. Trapp and I
were by the door one evening, measuring out the soot, when a man came
panting up the alley and rushed past us into the back kitchen without
so much as "by your leave." Half a minute later up came the press,
and the young officer at the head of them was for pushing past and
into the house; but Mr. Trapp blocked the doorway, with Mrs. Trapp
full of fight in the rear.

"Stand by!" says the officer to his men. "And you, sir, what the
devil do you mean by setting yourself in the way of his Majesty's
Service?"

"An Englishman's house," said Mr. Trapp, "is his castle."

"D'ye hear that?" screamed Mrs. Trapp.

"An Englishman's house," repeated Mr. Trapp slowly, "is his castle.
The storms may assail it, and the winds whistle round it, but the
King himself cannot do so."

The