VII. PAPA AND MAMMA 137

and the day before there had been a fresh breeze of it round the isle, at Spithead, exactly the kind of breeze that drifts the clouds, and ridges the waves, in Turner’s Gosport.

The ship was sending her boat on shore for some water, or the like-her little cutter, or somehow sailing, boat. There was a heavy sea running, and the sailors, and, I believe, also a passenger or two, had some difficulty in getting on board. “May I go, too?” said Charles to the captain, as he stood seeing them down the side. “Are you not afraid?” said the captain. “I never was afraid of anything in my life,” said Charles, and went down the side and leaped in.

The boat had not got fifty yards from the ship before she went over, but there were other boats sailing all about them, like gnats in midsummer. Two or three scudded to the spot in a minute, and every soul was saved, except Charles, who went down like a stone.

22nd January, 1834.

All this we knew by little and little. For the first day or two we would not believe it, but thought he must have been taken up by some other boat and carried to sea. At last came word that his body had been thrown ashore at Cowes: and his father went down to see him buried. That done, and all the story heard, for still the ship stayed, he came to Herne Hill, to tell Charles’s “auntie” all about it. (The old man never called my mother anything else than auntie.) It was in the morning, in the front parlour-my mother knitting in her usual place at the fireside, I at my drawing, or the like, in my own place also. My uncle told all the story, in the quiet, steady sort of way that the common English do, till just at the end he broke down into sobbing, saying (I can hear the words now), “They caught the cap off of his head, and yet they couldn’t save him.”

[Version 0.04: March 2008]