“Who but Joe Punchard, ma’am, that went away for rolling a barrel, and has been a-rolling ever since.”

“Ay, now I know your voice.  Back like a bad penny, are ye?  Come and see me tomorrow; I’m abed now.”

“But I’ve brought a friend with me—­another poor old mariner”—­with a wink at Benbow—­“who wants a night’s lodging.”

“Can he pay?” asks Mistress Hind.

“To be sure:  his pockets are full of pieces of eight and other sound coin.”

“Then I’ll come down to you; but ye must bide a minute or two till I throw a few things on, for I’d die rather than show myself to a mariner in my night rail.”

Benbow laughed again.

“’Tis twenty years or more since I saw Nell,” he said, “but I’d know her tongue in any company.”

And now the remembrance of my father’s illness, which the subsequent excitements had driven from my mind, returned with a sudden force that made me take a hasty leave of the two travelers, though both asked me to wait and drink a dish of coffee with them.  So I did not see the meeting of brother and sister, but learned from Joe next day the manner of it.

Mistress Hind did not recognize the captain, never having seen him from a boy, until, sitting at table with a dish of coffee before him, and she standing over him, bidding him haste that she might return to bed—­sitting thus, I say, he took up the dish and began to blow into it to cool it, as children do.

“Why,” says Mistress Hind, “tha blows it round and round to make little waves, just like my brother John.”

“Nelly!” says the captain, setting the dish down.

“And there they were,” said Joe in telling me the story, “in each other’s arms, and when she’d done drying her eyes she says,

“‘John, and I needn’t ha’ minded about the night rail!’”

It was nigh eleven o’clock when I got home—­a very late hour in our parts, and Mistress Pennyquick was in a great to-do, imagining all kinds of evil that might have befallen me.  Mr. Pinhorn had remained with my father a long time, she said; he was now asleep and was not to be disturbed.  I was myself fairly tired out, and fell asleep the instant my head touched the pillow.

Chapter 5:  I Lose My Best Friend.

There was a crowded courthouse next day when Ralph Mytton and Cyrus Vetch were brought before the Mayor and charged with breach of the peace and malicious damage to the property of lieges.  It was the first time that the Mohocks had been caught in the act, and their being well connected added a spice to the event.

The two prisoners bore themselves very differently.  Mytton, a nephew of the member of Parliament, assumed an air of bravado, smiled and winked at his friends in court, evidently trusting to his high connections to get him off lightly.  Vetch, on the other hand, was sullen and morose, never lifting his eyes from the floor except when I was giving my evidence, and then he threw me a glance in which I read, as clearly as in a book, the threat of venomous hate.  Both he and Mytton were very heavily fined, and the Mayor was good enough to compliment me on the part I had played.