Section 227. A TOUCHING SCENE AT SEA. I.

Two weeks ago⁠[1] on board an English steamer, a little ragged boy, aged nine years, was discovered on the fourth day of the voyage out from Liverpool to New York, and carried before the first mate, whose duty it was to deal with such cases. When questioned as to his object in being stowed away⁠[2], and who brought him on board, the boy, who had a beautiful sunny face, and eyes that looked like the very mirrors of truth, replied that his stepfather did it, because he could not afford⁠[3] to keep him, nor to pay his passage out to Halifax, where he had an aunt who⁠[4] was well off, and to whose house he was going. The mate did not believe the story, in spite of the winning face and truthful⁠[5] accents of the boy. He had seen too much of stow-aways⁠[6] to be easily deceived by them, he said; and it was his firm conviction that the boy had been brought on board and provided with food by the sailors. The little fellow was very roughly handled in consequence. Day by day he was questioned and re-questioned, but always with the same result. He did not know a sailor on board, and his father alone had secreted him, and given him the food which he ate. At⁠[7] last the mate, wearied by the boy’s persistence in the same story, and perhaps a little anxious to inculpate the sailors, seized him one day by the collar, and dragging him to the fore⁠[8], told him that (S. 211, N. 9) unless he would tell the truth in ten minutes from that time, he would hang him from the yard-arm.