The Golden Magnet Part 3

For some few minutes there was very little breakfast eaten; but at last my father roused us up, talking quite cheerfully, and evidently trying to reconcile my mother to my going, and then we went on with the meal.

"So Tom wants to go with you, does he?" said my father. "Well, he's a good, hard-headed sort of fellow, and likes you, Harry. He'd better go."

"But isn't he likely to lead poor Harry into mischief?" said my mother.

"No; he's more likely to act as ballast and keep him from capsizing if he carries too much sail. Tom's all right."

My mother accepted the inevitable in a very short time, and soon began to talk as mothers do--that is to say, homely mothers--for almost as soon as she had wiped her eyes she exclaimed--

"Why, Harry, my dear, you must have at least six new s.h.i.+rts."

"Must I, mother?" I said smiling.

"Yes, my son, and of the best and strongest stuff. I'm glad to say that I've just finished a couple of pairs of strongly-knitted stockings."

And from that hour, I believe, my mother was happy in her task of getting ready my sea-chest, putting in no end of pleasant little surprises for me, to be ready when I was in the far-off land.

Tom, too, was not forgotten, poor fellow, for he had no one to take tender notice of him.

"And it don't matter a bit, Mas'r Harry," he cried cheerily, "I don't want a lot o' things. One clean s.h.i.+rt and a pocket-comb--that's about all a chap like me wants."

But he was better provided than that, and at last, before a couple of months had pa.s.sed away, our farewells were said and we started for Liverpool, in low spirits with our partings, but full of hope and eager ambition, since at the great western port we were to take our pa.s.sage in one of the great steamers for the West Indies, where we would have to change into a smaller trading vessel which would take us on to Caracas.

"No soap-boiling out there, Mas'r Harry," cried Tom cheerily; and he gave a long sniff as if to get some of the familiar old smell into his nose.

"No, Tom," I replied quietly. "We are going to begin a new life now;"

for the future looked to me a far more serious affair than I had imagined before in the midst of my sanguine aspirations and rather wild and dreamy ideas.

CHAPTER FOUR.

TOM CATCHES THE COMPLAINT.

"Oh, my eye, Mas'r Harry! Dear heart, dear heart, how bad I do feel!"

"Why, you kept laughing at me, you wretch," I said, as I rejoiced at Tom's downfall.

"_Surely_, so I did, Mas'r Harry--I did, I did--but I didn't think it was half so--so bad as this here. Oh, my eye! how badly I do feel!"

"You old humbug, you!" I cried in my triumph, for I was getting over my troubles, "sneered and jeered and pooh-poohed it all, you did, Tom, and now it has you by the hip at last."

"No, it hasn't, Mas'r Harry," he groaned. "It aren't the hip, it's more in the middle. Oh, my eye! how ill I am!"

"I'm precious glad of it, Tom," I said.

"Well, I do call that cowardly, Mas'r Harry--I do really," groaned Tom--"'specially as you wasn't half so bad as I am."

"Why, I was ten times worse, Tom," I cried.

"Oh, Mas'r Harry! don't say that," groaned the poor fellow, "because it's unpossible. If--Oh, my eye! how ill I do feel!--if you'd been ten times as bad as I am, you'd have died ten times over. Oh, dear! oh, dear! How is it the doctors can't cure this horrid--? Oh, dear me! how ill I do feel!"

It was very unfeeling, of course, but all the same I sat down close to poor Tom as he lay upon the deck, and roared with laughter to see his miserable yellow face, and the way in which he screwed up his eyes. But it was only three days before when I was really ill that Tom was strutting about the deck ridiculing sea-sickness, and telling me what a poor sort of a fellow I was to knuckle under to a few qualms like that.

For I must confess to having been one of the first attacked when we were well out at sea. It was the first time I had ever seen the blue water; and no sooner did a bit of a gale spring up, and the great steamer begin to climb up the waves and then seem to be falling down, down, down in the most horrible way possible, than I began to prove what a thorough landsman I was, and, like a great many more pa.s.sengers, was exceedingly ill.

I remember thinking that it would have been much better if I had stayed at home instead of tempting the seas.

Then as I grew worse I called myself by all sorts of names for coming upon such a mad expedition.

Then I vowed that if I could get on sh.o.r.e again, I'd never come to sea any more.

Lastly I grew so bad that I didn't care what became of me, and I felt that if the steamer sank I should be relieved from all my terrible pains.

And all this time Tom was skipping about the deck as merry as a lark, chaffing with the sailors or making friends with the firemen, and every now and then coming to me and making me so cross that I felt as if I could hit him.

"Now do let me fetch the doctor to you, Mas'r Harry," he kept on saying, pulling a solemn face, but with his eyes looking full of fun.

"I tell you I don't want the doctor. Don't be such an a.s.s, Tom," I cried.

"But you do seem so ill, Mas'r Harry," he said with mock sympathy. "Let me see if I can get you some brimstone and treacle."

"Just you wait till I get better, Tom," I said feebly. "You nasty wretch, you. Brimstone and treacle! Ugh!"

My sufferings ought to have awakened his sympathy, but it did not in the least, and I found that n.o.body thought anything of a sea-sick pa.s.senger.

But at last I got over it, and, to my intense delight, all of a sudden Tom was smitten with the complaint, and became more prostrate than even I.

I did not forget the way he had tortured me, and you may be sure that I did not omit to ask him if he would try the brimstone and treacle. I behaved worse to him, I believe, for I tortured him by taking him cold fat pork and hard biscuits, and paid him various other little attentions of a kindred sort, making him groan with pain, till one day--it was while the sea was very rough, and I thought him too ill to move--he suddenly got up.

"Tell you what, Mas'r Harry," he said, "I'm not going to stand your games no longer. I shall get up and be better;" and better he seemed to grow at once, so that by the next day he was almost himself again, and we stood by the high bulwarks watching the great Atlantic rollers as they came slowly on, as if to swallow up our s.h.i.+p.

CHAPTER FIVE.

A SAILOR ON SEA-SERPENTS.

"It do puzzle me, Mas'r Harry," said Tom, as we sat in the chains one bright, sunny day, when the storm was over, but a fine stiff breeze was helping the toiling engines to send the steamer along at a splendid rate.

"What puzzles you, Tom?" I asked.

"Why, where all the water comes from. Just look at it now. Here have we been coming along for more'n a week, and it's been nothing but water, water, water."

"And we could go on for months, Tom, sailing, sailing away into the distant ocean, and still it would be nothing but water, water, water."

"Well, but what's the good of it all, Mas'r Harry? Why, if I was to get up a company to do it, and drain it all off, the bottom of the sea here would be all land, and people could walk or have railways instead of being cooped up in a great long tossing box like this, and made so--Oh, dear me, it nearly makes me ill again to think of it."

"Ah! that would be a capital arrangement, Tom," I said smiling. "What a lot more room there would be on the earth then!"