The very night after our company was thus dissolved the mayor was knocked down at the foot of Swan Hill by the Town Wall, gagged and trussed, and laid upon his own doorstep, where he was found by the maidservant in the morning, having wrought himself to the verge of apoplexy by his struggles to rid himself of his bonds.  He besought the captain with tears of outraged dignity to resume his guardianship of the town; but the old warrior merely rubbed his nose and spoke of rheumatism.

The outrages occurred only at intervals, and ceased altogether during the college terms, when Dick Cludde was absent, so that we were not far wrong in our inference that he was the fount and origin of the deeds of lawlessness.  The townsfolk, you may be sure, did not love him; nor did the high and mighty airs Sir Richard and my lady chose to assume in their dealings with the citizens win them many friends; so that when it became known, about the time when Dick left Cambridge finally, without a degree, that his father had suffered serious reverses of fortune in his adventures in oversea trade, there were few who felt anything but satisfaction.

At this time I was midway in my seventeenth year—­a big strapping fellow standing five feet ten, having quite outgrown the delicacy of my childhood.  I was high up in the school, on good terms with the masters, though my Latin and Greek was never considerable:  on better terms with the boys, for, I must own, my inclinations were rather towards baseball and quoits than towards the nice discrimination of longs and shorts.  I had developed in particular an amazing strength of arm, which stood me in good stead in wrestling bouts, and led to my being counted two in our tugs of war.  It was this same strength, I fancy, that made my schoolfellows chary of provoking me to wrath, for which I was somewhat sorry, having always loved a fight.

During these years no tidings came to us of Joe Punchard.  His poor mother, who earned a living by washing for some of our Shrewsbury folk, feared the worst from his long silence.  But Mistress Nelly Hind, who kept a coffee shop in Raven Street, called Mistress Punchard a croaker and bade her be of good cheer, for she had neither seen nor directly heard from her brother John Benbow for twenty years; yet he was alive and well, and captain of a king’s ship, if rumor were not a false, lying jade.

“Not that your Joe will ever rise to such a height,” she added.

“Sure he’s a better boy than ever your John was,” said Mistress Punchard, up in arms for her offspring.

“John’s legs are as straight as the bed post,” retorted his sister, and then the two women began a war of words, in the midst of which, having drunk my dish of coffee, I slipped away.

I rarely speculated on my future, and my father never spoke of it.  We took it for granted that I should succeed him in his little property, and during the school holidays I sometimes accompanied him to market, and learned to handle samples of grain and to discuss the points of his fat cattle.