84 THE BEST SEASOX ON RECORD. 



cleverly tlirougli the throng of horsemen — from among 

 whom one would now and then turn off after him for a 

 few strides, like a puppy leaving the pack after a hare — 

 only to rejoin his comrades under the impression that he 

 had seen something uncanny, and that so many late 

 nights in succession would really never do. Every rider of 

 the whole company passed ; but Boy still went doggedly 

 on, driving his sheeted and hooded conveyance round to 

 complete his allotted cycle, and treating the stray crowd 

 with as much unconcern as if only a flock of starlings 

 were fussing past. Not out of mere curiosity, but in 

 some slender hope of being enabled to inculcate even a 

 little of this rigid respect for duty and orders into the 

 members of my own ill-regulated establishment, I would 

 gladly learn what influence was at work to render that 

 Boy so entirely callous to all outer surroundings. Are 

 the stirrup-leathers at Morton Lodge, think you, kept 

 supple by the same use as that to which Mr. Isaac was 

 accustomed to put them in Market Harboro' '? Does a 

 bit of rope's end still survive to keep up old associations 

 with blue water ? Or again, did the Boy's master 

 happen to be the flrst man to jump into that fallow-field 

 — transfixing him at once with a quarter-deck eye that 

 there was no mistaking ? May we look to any of these, 

 or was some deeper seated agency at work to produce 

 an adherence to duty that we had hitherto believed to 

 exist only under the direct superintendence of the drill 

 sergeant or the boatswain's mate ? I seem to see that 

 rigid imperturbable horseman still ; but for the life of me 

 I cannot (with a certain experience of the genus) bring 



