Her going made a great gap in my life, and the outer things began to call on me.  My ideas respecting them were dim and distorted enough, as I afterwards found, but their call was all the more insistent for that.  Lying flat on Tintageu, chin on fist, I would watch the white-sailed ships pushing eagerly to that wonderful outer world and long to be on them.  There were great ships carrying wine and brandy to the West Indies, where the people were all black, and the most wonderful plants grew, and the palm trees.  And to Canada and Newfoundland, where the great icebergs came down through the mist.  And some carrying fish to the Mediterranean, whose shores were all alive with wonders, to say nothing of the chances of seeing some fighting on the way, for England was at war with France and Spain, and rumours of mighty doings reached us at times.  And some taking tea and tobacco to Hamburg and Emden, where the people were all uncouth foreigners who spoke neither French nor English and so must offer mighty change from Sercq.

Then there were multitudes of smaller vessels, sloops and chasse-marees, bound on shorter and still more profitable, if more dangerous voyages.  Wherever they were going, on whatsoever errand bent, it was into the great outside world, and they all cried, “Come!”

Those shorter flights to the nearer shores had a special appeal of their own, and the stories one heard among one’s fellows—­of the wild midnight runs into Cornish creeks and Devon and Dorset coves, of encounters now and again with the revenue men, of exhilarating flights and narrow escapes from Government cutters—­these but added zest to the traffic in one’s imagination which, in actual fact, might possibly have been found wanting.

The moral aspects of the free-trade business did not trouble me in the slightest in those days.  It was the old-established and natural trade of the Islands, for which they had evidently been set just where they were with that special end in view.  We looked upon it as very much akin to the running of cargoes into blockaded ports—­a large profit for a large risk and no ill-feeling, though, indeed, at times, human nature would out, and attempts at the enforcement of laws in the making of which we had no hand, would result in collisions, and occasionally in the shedding of blood.  Incidents of that kind were, of course, to be regretted, and were certainly not sought for by our Island men, though doubtless at times the wilder spirits would seek reprisal for the thwarting of their plans.  But when even one of the great men in England, who made these laws against free-trading, could tell his fellow-lawmakers that the mind of man never could conceive of it as at all equalling in turpitude those acts which are breaches of clear moral virtue—­how should it be expected that the parties chiefly interested should take a stricter view of the matter?

In course of time my longing for the wider life found expression, first in looks, and at last in words, which, indeed, were not needed, for my mother had seen and understood long before I spoke.