Captain Mugford Part 18

Mr Clare lives--a venerable clergyman in one of our great cities--his head and heart yet labouring earnestly in the Great Cause he serves.

Captain Mugford sleeps in the home of his adoption--the ocean. Five years after our six months together he sailed from Bristol as boatswain of a splendid s.h.i.+p for the Pacific. A fortnight after, he was spoken by a homeward-bound brig, and that was the last ever heard of honest Roland Mugford, or the s.h.i.+p he sailed in. I hope seas, winds, and undercurrents, however rough they may have been, left undisturbed the red bandanna and the short black pipe. And we feel sure that the mother's prayers were answered, and that the boy who ran away from her in his youth came back to her,--whither her memory was a beacon light-- the Eternal Harbour, unstirred by storms.

Walter is a man of eminence--a diplomatist--and Harry a merchant, a cheerful, generous-hearted man, whose name is the synonym of honour, and whose hands "to do good, and to distribute, forget not."

Drake, who entered the army after travelling in every strange and dim corner of the globe--frozen up in the Arctic Seas, perspiring in the interior of Africa, exploring among the western wilds of the Rocky Mountains, and doing other things adventurous in every out-of-the-way part--finally went with all his honest, hot zeal to India, where, fighting his country's battles, he spent many years of his life, and came back a general and one-legged man. Now he _stumps_ about in this same library, but manages to take me travelling thousands of never-weary miles; and many and many a time do we walk, and shoot, and swim, and race, and fight over and over again that happy time at the cape.

Poor Alfred--the best of all of us--died before his thirtieth year, nursed by a few devoted Africans, at his missionary station in the southern Atlantic.

And I, whom the general calls "Vieux Moustache," have finished an old Boy's Story of "Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors."

THE END.