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he kept them from starvation, I never heerd a doubt expressed. But Cap'n Elwell, I've been told, he thought it was the prayers. There was a shower come up that evening, too, and the men they saved a little water, and got poor Bub to drink it. I never could get my grandfather nor any one of 'em I knew, to talk much of what took place upon the "America" after that. Up to that p'int, he'd talk and talk. But there he stuck. I take it the sufferings they suffered from that time to the rescue was of those things that no mortal man can jabber of. It's much with misery as it is with happiness, I think. About so far, you're glad of company, and you like to cry a sort of boat ahoy! to other folks' joys or sorrows; but there you stop; you draw in, and hold your tongue and keep your counsel. Other folks don't matter.

Most I know is how they'd drifted someway nigh Long Island when they was taken off. It was the second day of August, 1780. The boat that sighted them was bound from Dartmouth, over to England, to New York city. Seems to me, her Cap'n's name was Neal. At any rate, she set eyes on the "America," driftin' helpless up and down; and those men, like dead men, setting on the deck; and whether they made signals I don't know, but my impression is, they'd lost the strength to use their voice. But Neal, he lowered his boat, and he went to see. And there they was before him. And he took 'em off, and brought 'em home.

And all the town turned out to greet them when they come. Some folks I've heerd they shouted, but others stood and sobbed to see 'em. And mostly, I think, they took 'em to their wives and children, and never stopped to ask no questions, but shut the door and went about their business.

Years and years, when I was a little chap, I've seen those men about our town. Folks looked on 'em as folks may have looked, I often think, on the fellows that come out of the tombs when Christ was crucified, and walked and talked among the livin'. I used to have a feeling as I was afraid of 'em, and must speak softly, for fear I'd wake 'em up. And Cap'n Elwell, he lived to be ninety-being postmaster-and his wife very nigh the same.

No; I was coming to that. I always hate to, when I tell the story. But gospel's gospel, and gospel true you can't manufacture nor make over no more'n you can the light of sunrise, or a salt east wind.

Of all them men on the "America," six months tossing on the tides, and starved, and crazed, and tortured, as they was, one only died. They all come back but just that one. And he was the poor young lad that they called Bub.

Now, there's a singular thing about that p'int. The men that come home you never could get them to tell of that poor young creetur's last hours. Of the time and manner of his death, no man would speak. Some say it was too dreadful to be talked of, that he suffered so, and raved about his wife enough to break the hearts of them that heerd. Some say he got delirious and jumped into the water. Others have it that he just wasted on and pined away, and that he lay and begged for water, and there was a little in a dipper, but that the boys were stupefied, as you might say, and out of their own heads, and nobody noticed it to give it him. And others say another thing.

One night I come home and found my grandfather there, I can remember just as plain, setting on the settle by the fireplace. "Grandfather," says I, walking up and setting down and opening of my jackknife, I remember, while I asked the question, "grandfather, what become of Bub?"

"Bub died," says the old man, short enough; "we've talked enough of Bub."

"Wal," says I, "what I want to know is, you didn't draw for him?"

"WHAT?" roars the old man, turning on me, like to knock

me over.

"Folks say," says I, "how the men on the 'America' drawed lots when they was starving, to eat each other up; and I heerd say the lot fell on Bub. I said I knew better than that," says I, "and so I thought I'd ask. You didn't eat him, did you, grandfather?" says I, as innocent as that.

I remember I was whittling a thole pin with my jackknife, and I remember how I whittled it all round smooth, before that old man spoke or stirred. Then, up he come, and shook me till the breath was nigh out of my impudent little body, and glares down at me, till I'm frightened so I begin to cry.

"If ever I catch you listening to such damned stuff again," says grandfather, "I'll have your father fiog you till he's like to break every bone you've got!" Although he was a pious man, my grandfather did say, "damned stuff." And, after that, he wasn't pacified with me for a year to come.

In all that miserable story, now, there's one thing I like to think of. The poor young woman never lived to know. Whether it was the oncertainty and distress-but something went wrong with her, everybody agrees on that; and she and her baby, they both died before the boys come home without him. There used to be an old nurse, a very old creetur, about town, that folks said took care of her, and told about it; and how, at the very last, she set erect in bed, with all that hair of hers about her, and says, quite gentle and happy in her mind:

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"My husband's coming home to-night," says she; and up she raised her arms and moved one hand about, though feeble, as she was patting some one on the cheek, acrost the empty pillow; and so died.

THE HEART OF ENGLAND.1

BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE.

(From "England Without and Within.”)

[RICHARD GRANT WHITE, Shakespearean scholar and critic, was born in New York, May 22, 1822; died there April 8, 1885. He studied medicine and law; became a journalist; was a contributor to the New York Courier and Enquirer, and for several years its editor; and during the Civil War wrote a series of letters, signed "Yankee," for the London Spectator. Later he was connected with the United States Revenue Bureau in New York. He enjoyed a wide reputation as a Shakespearean scholar, and was the author of "Shakespeare's Scholar," "Memoirs of the Life of William Shakespeare," "Everyday English," and “England Without and Within." He edited Shakespeare's plays 1857–1865, and in 1883.]

It was on a bright Sunday morning in October that I set out from Warwick for Stratford-on-Avon. Autumn was more than half gone; and yet the almost cloudless sky was one of a succession of smiling welcomes which, meeting me in the southern counties, had gone with me to Cambridge and to Oxford, and now followed me into Warwickshire, the heart of England, for so this most midland shire is called. .

My bright Warwickshire day was not so pleasant as it might have been, or as some other bright days, or even as many cloudy days that I had seen in England.

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1 Copyright, 1881, by Richard Grant White. Used by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

Warwick is reckoned a Shakespearean town; but I did not particularly care for it on that account, my liking for Shakespeare not taking the form of relic worship or house haunting. But Warwick has intrinsic interest for every student of England in the past, for every lover of architectural beauty, or of that beauty of reclaimed nature which is found in perfection in great English parks and around English country seats and farmhouses.

Warwick is one of those towns, of which there are not a few in England, for the existence of which it is difficult to account. Why people should have gathered their dwellings together at this spot in sufficient numbers to make a large town is not easily discoverable. It has no trade, no manufactures, no cathedral, no schools, no centralizing attraction. How the people live there is a mystery. For visiting strangers can do little to support the inhabitants of such a place; and whence do the Warwickers get the money wherewith to pay each other? The castle, part of which was built before the Conquest, must be the nucleus around which the town slowly gathered through centuries, until it stopped growing. For there is nothing new about it. On the contrary, it has a charming air of having been finished long ago, of having got its growth, and fulfilled its purpose.

To Warwick Castle, the gate of which is within a stone's throw of the main street of the town, I went alone, my selfelected guide having not yet arrived. It was very strange to turn out of a paved, gas-lit street, lined on either side with shops and dingy brick houses, into a gloomy causeway cut deep through the solid rock, shaded with great trees, and winding gently up an acclivity to a grim gray mass of feudal masonry; and such is the approach to Warwick Castle. The buildings, which stand around a large, grassy base-court, are of various periods, but all of great age, one of the towers having been erected in Saxon times. I pulled the handle at the end of a chain hanging at the principal entrance, and was admitted. Within I found some half a dozen persons, decent English folk of the middle class, waiting their turn to go through the apartments. It is the custom in these great show places for an attendant to make the tour as soon as a sufficient number of sightseers have assembled to make it worth while to do so; and at Warwick Castle this happens usually about every hour or two during daylight, when the family is not in residence.

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