self-organised, self-dependent, and bound together in common
iniquities and the dread of common retribution, who were in Aberalva,
as all fishing towns, the torment and terror of all douce fogies, male
and female,--even the Boys, I say, respected Captain Willis, so potent
was the influence of his gentleness; nailed not up his shutters, nor
tied fishing-lines across his doorway; tail-piped not his dog, nor
sent his cat to sea on a barrel-stave; nor put live crabs into his
pocket, nor dead dog-fish into his well; yea, even when judgment, too
long provoked, made bare her red right hand, and the lieutenant vowed
by his commission that he would send half-a-dozen of them to the
treadmill, they would send up a deputation to "beg Captain Willis to
beg the schoolmistress to beg them off." For between Willis and
that fair young creature a friendship had grown up, easily to be
understood. Willis was one of those rare natures upon whose purity no
mire can cling; who pass through the furnace, and yet not even the
smell of fire has passed upon them. Bred, almost born, on board a
smuggling cutter, in the old war-times; then hunting, in the old
coast-blockade service, the smugglers among whom he had been trained;
watching the slow horrors of the Walcheren; fighting under Collingwood
and Nelson, and many another valiant Captain; lounging away years
of temptation on the West-Indian station, as sailing-master of a
ship-of-the-line; pensioned comfortably now for many a year in his
native town, he had been always the same gentle, valiant, righteous
man; sober in life, strict in duty, and simple in word; a soul as
transparent as crystal, and as pure. He was the oracle of
Aberalva now; and even Lieutenant Brown would ask his
opinion,--non-commissioned officer though he was,--in a tone which was
all the more patronising, because he stood a little in awe of the old
man.