Nat, the
``bucket-maker,'' grave and sober, left the seas, and, I believe,
is a hack-driver in his native town, although I have not had the
luck to see him since the Alert hauled into her berth at the North
End.
One cold winter evening, a pull at the bell, and a woman in distress
wished to see me. Her poor son George,-- George Somerby,-- ``you
remember him, sir; he was a boy in the Alert; he always talks of
you,-- he is dying in my poor house.'' I went with her, and in a
small room, with the most scanty furniture, upon a mattress on the
floor,-- emaciated, ashy pale, with hollow voice and sunken eyes,--
lay the boy George, whom we took out a small, bright boy of fourteen
from a Boston public school, who fought himself into a position on
board ship (ante, p. 295), and whom we brought home a tall, athletic
youth, that might have been the pride and support of his widowed
mother. There he lay, not over nineteen years of age, ruined by every
vice a sailor's life absorbs. He took my hand in his wasted feeble
fingers, and talked a little with his hollow, death-smitten voice.
I was to leave town the next day for a fortnight's absence, and whom
had they to see to them? The mother named her landlord,-- she knew no
one else able to do much for them.
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