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MENHARDOC, A STORY OF CORNISH NETS AND MINES, BY GEORGE MANVILLE FENN.

CHAPTER ONE.

INTRODUCES WILL AND HIS HENCHMAN, JOSH.

"You don't know it, Master Will, lad, but Natur' couldn't ha' done no
better for you if she'd tried."

"Why, Josh?"

"Why, lad? There's a queshton to ask! Why? Warn't you born in
Co'rn'all, the finest country in all England, and ain't you going to
grow into a Cornishman, as all old books says is giants, when you've
left off being a poor smooth, soft-roed, gallish-looking creatur', same
as you are now?"

The utterer of these words certainly spoke them, but in a musical,
sing-song intonation peculiar to the fishermen of the district. He was
a fair, short man, somewhat deformed, one arm being excessively short,
seeming little more than a hand projecting from one side of his breast;
but this in no wise interfered with his activity as he stood there
glittering in the bright morning sunshine on the deck of a Cornish
lugger, shaking pilchards out of the dark-brown net into the well or
hold.

Josh Helston glittered in the morning sunshine like a harlequin in a
limelight, for he was spangled from head to foot with the loose silvery
scales of the pilchards caught during the night, and on many another
night during the past few weeks. There were scales on his yellow
south-wester, in his fair closely-curling hair, a couple on his
ruddy-brown nose, hundreds upon his indigo-blue home-knit jersey, and
his high boots, that were almost trousers and boots in one, were
literally burnished with the adherent disks of silvery iridescent horn.

The "poor smooth, gallish-looking creatur'" he addressed was a
well-built young fellow of seventeen, with no more effeminacy in his
appearance than is visible in a lad balanced by nature just on that edge
of life where we rest for a short space uneasily, bidding good-bye to
boyhood so eagerly, before stepping boldly forward, and with flushed
face and flashing eyes feeling our muscles and the rough hair upon our
cheeks and chins, and saying, in all the excitement of the discovery of
that El Dorado time of life, "At last I am a man!"

Josh Helston's words did not seem fair, but his way was explained once
to Michael Polree as they stood together on the pier; and the latter had
expostulated after his fashion, for he never spoke much, by saying:

"Easy, mate, easy."

"Easy it is, Mike," sang rather than said Josh. "I know what I'm ab