swim, I on his back, and he, broad-chested, breasting the waves.

Not that this taught me to swim, for some few years afterwards I was all but drowned from being unable to swim. I had got out of my depth while bathing, and was drowning, when a man, hearing the cries of my younger brother who was on the bank, plunged in and brought me out. I had ceased to struggle, and had fallen into a pleasant dream. The events of past years were passing through my mind as one so often reads of being the accompaniment of drowning. I experienced no feeling of suffocation, and when I became dimly sensible of a man floundering near me, and trying to bring out, I felt passively indifferent as I were brought out or not. My erefore, goes to prove that drowneasy death, though not, perhaps, under ordinary circum

ears afterwards, I was

fever. The doctor had

my recovery.

My mess

me afterwards, had said

, poor fellow, he has not

long to live.' I, myself, was waiting for death. Days and nights came and went, but brought no distinct impression with them of the lapse of time. I tried to pray, and to think of the eternal existence into which I was gliding, but my brain was too weak to bear the pressure of a thought. I suffered no pain of mind or body, and had I died then, instead of lived, no death could have been easier. I was restored by the prayers and wisely-directed treatment of the gentleman who had me removed to his house-Mr. Hobson, the Colonial Chaplain of Shanghai. Medicine from the ship used to be sent on shore to me regularly once or twice a day, and this, as regularly, he used to throw away, and give me, instead of it, doses of bottled stout. Thus God, in His loving thoughtfulness and tender care, brings us often face to face with Death, to accustom us to the look of the so-called king of terrors, that when he comes at last as God's messenger to us, we may hail him as an old acquaintance whom we have often seen before, and from whom we have nothing to fear,

CHAPTER II.

MEMORY, carry me now back to school-boy days, and point to what in that tumultuous, reckless time comes out clearest! A hundred scenes crowd forward; the rush at football, the determined scuffle at hockey (I am in Yorkshire), the organised general fights with the town boys, the stand-up fights on our own accounts, to settle private differences among ourselves, and become firmer friends ever after, the flecks of sunlight through the leaves of the green woods on summer holidays, the climbing after hawks' nests on the tops of big trees, and the absence of all care, and the presence of a feeling of unalloyed enjoyment when with a chum we would start off across country, on a half-holiday, to some lately-discovered nest of rare eggs as yet known only to ourselves.

Here memory whispers What about other half-holidays, and occasions not of unalloyed enjoyment?' Yes, I must confess it. I had

but little fondness for Latin and Greek, or for anything, in fact, that was taught at school, and I should have learnt nothing if, in addition to minor thrashings, I had not been sent up to the head master to be flogged every Saturday for the accumulated delinquencies of the week; and that was the only species of punishment that ever did me good. Sometimes, in lieu of it, from false motives of humanity I presume, I used to be kept in on half-holidays to write impositions.' With-I do not know how many hundred lines of Virgil to write out, I used to sit, locked up in the big school-room, in the attitude and with the expression of Fagan in the condemned cell. There I used to sit, in a hateful frame of mind, maddened by hearing every now and then from the distant cricket-field, the exciting cries-'Heave up '—'Well fielded,' and the row that told me that an innings had been lost and won; and of these bad moods the devil knows how to take advantage. After the severest flogging, if I deserved it, as I generally did, I never felt the slightest animosity against the master, and, in fact, my respect for him was considerably enhanced, as well as my own selfrespect when I took it without howling or sing

ing out. Solomon says plainly that 'he that spareth his rod hateth his son,' and all thorough boys will confess that he is right. A good thrashing is in every way beneficial, but the so-called 'humane punishments' have a totally opposite effect-hardening the heart, stupifying the intellect, and producing a bad, vindictive feeling.

I therefore made up my mind to go to sea. My father approved of my choice; and rather heightened my longing for it by frequently telling me the story of his action with the French fleet off Toulon, and of the taking of Genoa, in which he was engaged.

My appointment to the Navy not coming as quickly as I wished, I urged him to allow me to go a voyage in an East Indiaman, to which he consented. I found it a rough school, and not a particularly good one, unless when it is an object to cure a boy of his fancy for the sea. But I was incurable. I worked like the ship's boys, and for the first voyage-I never went a second-paid sixty pounds for the privilege, and spent a considerable portion of my time shinning up the top-gallant rigging to loose or furl the upper sails.