[ 538 ] [MAY, 



THE PRESSED MAN : A TALE OF THE COAST. 



THE recollections of childhood are the last that fade from the memory; 

 the joys and predilections of early youth cling round the heart and the 

 imagination with a force far beyond those of our riper years. Thirty 

 hard-working summers saw me confined to a small inland village, where 

 was no water, save a brook that had hardly force sufficient to turn the 

 mill-wheel, and whose inhabitants had nothing from which they could 

 form an idea of a boat, much less of a ship, save the crazy punt in which 

 the miller occasionally angled, or bobbed for eels, in the sluggish stream. 

 Nay, so little interested were they which way the wind blew, that the 

 weathercock on the church spire was allowed to remain, rusty and 

 crooked, pointing perennially to the south-west, from whence came the 

 gale that had warped it out of its due perpendicularity. 



These thirty years beheld me successively the apprentice, shopman, and 

 master of what, in a remote country place, is called expressively The Shop: 

 the store whence pattens and treacle, French lace and plums, mops and 

 mahogany chairs, candles and patent medicines, may indifferently be 

 purchased. At length came the moderate competence which permitted 

 some relaxation to the weary labourer ; and, oh ! with what sensations of 

 joy and chastened pride did I ascend my own modest gig to spend my 

 first holiday in revisiting the place of my birth ; gazing, at length, once 

 more on the mighty ocean, and hailing my cherished old acquaintances, 

 the white sails dancing on its bosom. 



Every one who has run down the line of coast from Brighton to 

 Portsmouth must have remarked the cleanly, respectable-looking, and 

 pretty village of E. Here was I born ; its schoolmistress, the dread and 

 torment, its carpenters' yard (dignified with the name of dock-yard), 

 the delight and solace of my boyish days. On its bay my mimic ship 

 hoisted its paper sails to the wind j in its fishing boats my gayest holidays 

 were spent. It was about four o'clock of a beautiful summer afternoon 

 that I drove up to the door of its best inn that door from which I had 

 often been chased with threats by the angry waiters when, one of a 

 dozen or more dirty, ragged, and mischievous imps, I was hallooing and 

 hurraing the coach that brought news of our sailors' triumphs under a 

 Duncan or a Nelson. I was disappointed. Every object had lost the 

 magnificence with which my childish wonder once clothed it : the pretty 

 village I remembered had first expanded into a moderate- sized town, 

 and was now dwindling again into an assemblage of houses " to lei" 

 and half-ruined warehouses ; the cottage in which I was born had been 

 razed to make room for a manufactory, which, nourished by the demands 

 of war, had been ruined by the return of the pressing times of peace. 



In my inquiries after the companions of my boyish days, I was not 

 more fortunate. Most of them were too obscure and humble to dwell 

 in the recollection of " him of the inn," but two had signalized them- 

 selves in the annals of E. One, its hero, had perished on the same deck, 

 and in the same moment, with the immortal Nelson ; to the other had 

 been prescribed, by certain right honourable physicians of the soul, a 

 fourteen years' sojourn in the mild climate of Sidney, as the only means 

 of curing an unfortunate crookedness of finger, and itching of the palms 

 of the hands, with which he was grievously afflicted. In despair I gave 

 up all further questions, and solaced myself for an hour or two with my 

 chop and modicum of port. 



