“Well, Mr. Benjamin, I shouldn’t wonder—­but—­Oh! mercy, it’s he!” cried my mother.  “Oh! be quick—­sal-wolatily!”

“Sail who?  What the devil does she mean?” said my father, rising up and putting my sister off his knee.

“I never heard of her,” replied Ben, also getting up; “but Mistress Saunders seems taken all aback, anyhow.  Jack, run and fetch a bucket of water!”

“Jack, stay where you are,” cried my mother, springing from the chair on which she had thrown herself.  “Oh, dear me! the shock was so sudden—­I’m so flustered.  Who’d have thought to have seen you?”

“Are you her brother?” inquired Ben.

“No; but I’m her husband,” replied my father.

“Well, it’s the first time I’ve heard that she had one—­but I’ll be off, for Mistress Saunders is too genteel to kiss, I see, before company.”  Ben then took up his stick and left the house.

It may be as well here to remark that during his absence my father had fallen in with one of the men who had been employed in the press-gang.  From him he learned that a woman had given the information by which he was taken.  He made the man, who was present when my mother called upon the officer, describe her person, and the description in every point was so accurate that my father had no doubt in his mind but that it was my mother who had betrayed him.  This knowledge had for years rankled in his breast, and he had come home, not only from a wish to see how things were going on, but to reproach my mother with her treachery.

Whether my mother’s conscience smote her, or that she perceived by my father’s looks that a squall was brewing, I know not; but as soon as Ben had left the house, she shut the street-door that the neighbors might not hear.  Having so done, she turned to my father, who had resumed his seat and his pipe.

“Well,” said she, putting her apron to her eyes, “you have been away a good six years, and left me to get on how I could with these two poor orphanless children.”

“You know best why I went,” replied my father, “and by whose means I was walked off in such a hurry.”

“Me?” replied my mother.

“Yes, you,” responded my father.

“Well, what next?” cried she.

“I’ll tell you what next,” said my father, rising, and taking about eighteen inches of inch-and-a-half rope out of his pocket, “Look you, ma’am, when I first found out that it was by your peaching that I was sent on board of the tender, I made up this colt, and I vowed that I would keep it in my pocket till I served you out.  Now the time’s come.”

Here my father flourished his rope’s end.  My mother would have flown to the door, but my father was beforehand with her; he turned the key, and, to the astonishment of Virginia and me, he seized my mother, and, holding her at arm’s length, gave her several blows—­not severe ones, I must acknowledge, indeed, they could not have hurt her.