s bare feet was
bandaged, and scarcely touched the ground at each step. He looked dusty
and fatigued, yet he was a stout, well-favoured, robust young fellow, so
that his hapless condition was evidently the result of recent misfortune
and accident--not of prolonged sickness or want. He wore the
picturesque blue jacket, wide trousers, and straw hat of a man-of-war's
man; and exposed a large amount of brown chest beneath his blue flannel
shirt, the broad collar of which was turned well over.

Going straight to the inn of the village, he begged for a night's food
and lodging. Told a sad story, in off-hand fashion, of how he had been
shipwrecked on the western isles of Scotland, where he had lost all he
possessed, and had well-nigh lost his life too; but a brave fisherman
had pulled him out of the surf by the hair of the head, and so he was
saved alive, though with a broken leg, which took many weeks to mend.
When he was able to travel, he had set out with his crutch, and had
walked two hundred miles on his way to Liverpool, where his poor wife
and two helpless children were living in painful ignorance of his sad
fate!

Of course this was enough to arouse all the sympathies of the villagers,
few of whom had ever seen a real sailor of any kind in their lives--much
less a shipwrecked one. So the poor fellow was received with open arms,
entreated hospitably, lodged and fed at the public expense, and in the
morning sent on his way rejoicing.

All the forenoon of that day the shipwrecked sailor limped on his way
through a populous district of old England in the midst of picturesque
scenery, gathering pence and victuals, ay, and silver and even gold too,
from the pitying inhabitants as he went along. Towards the afternoon he
came to a more thinly peopled district, and after leaving a small hamlet
in which he had reaped a rich harvest he limped to the brow of the hill
at the foot of which it lay, and gazed for a few minutes at the prospect
before him.

It was a wide stretch of moorland, across which the road went in almost
a straight line. There were slight undulations in the land, but no
houses or signs of the presence of man.

Having limped on until the village was quite hidden from view, the
sailor quietly put his crutch across his broad shoulder, and brightening
up wonderfully, walked across the moor at the rate of full five miles an
hour, whistling gaily in concert with the larks as he sped along.

An hour and a h