If he happened to be at home, on leave or on half-pay, the Captain sometimes asked my father to go out shooting with him, and when I was quite a kiddy I was so fearfully keen to go too, that once I crept away and followed them. My father would have sent me back, had not the Captain growled out—and he had an awfully deep growling voice—"Let the nipper come along o’ us, Padré;" and you may be jolly well certain that I did follow them, keeping close behind the Captain, without saying a word, and with my eyes glued on him, just to see exactly what he did. I got so tired, that if I hadn’t been afraid of making a noise I should have cried.
"Send the young ’un to sea. He’ll do," he had said when my father, very angry at having his day’s sport spoilt, had at last to carry me back.
That is the first I remember of Captain Lester, and is why I remember what he said. Afterwards he would often let me go with him, and when I was big enough would let me hold his great mongrel dog "Blucher". The Captain used to take this dog to sea with him, and always brought him out shooting; but he used to get so excited that he would obey nobody, and if let loose, always ranged ahead of the guns, and put up every bird for miles. The result was that he was kept on the chain nearly all the time.
Although he was so useless, the Captain would never leave him behind. "I’ve spoilt the dog taking him to sea", he would growl; "I ain’t going to spoil his bit of sport", and he always let him have a run "on his own" towards the end of the day.
Sometimes his eldest girl, Nan, used to come too, and as she worshipped her father just as much as I did, we became quite chums, and had many a jolly day together, while we hung on to old Blucher’s chain, and he tugged us about.
She worried very much because she was a girl and couldn’t go to sea, but of course that wasn’t her fault—I told her so, often—and it always made me feel what a jolly good thing it was to be a man, and that I was going to sea. I had made up my mind to that, and had never forgotten what the Captain had said. I simply longed for the sea, and used to spend every moment I could down among the fishing boats, helping to spread the nets out along the shore to dry, and sometimes taking a hand in mending them. I made chums, too, of the boys in the smaller smacks, which worked close inshore, and one of them took me out several times in his uncle’s boat.