Thirty Years From Home; or, a Voice From the Main Deck Being the Experience of Samuel Leech — Context and Discussion

erance from bondage, and with beaming eyes and cheerful face hurried to bid adieu to my classmates in the day and in the Sunday school--a sad proof of the unfitness of my aunt for her task; since a child properly treated, will love its _home_ too well to quit it without a tear; and if parents and guardians wish to prevent their children from being wanderers and stragglers through the wide world, let me bid them exert the utmost effort to make their home pleasant. Throw a charm round it, make it enchanted ground, cause it to become, in the language of a living poet,

“The fairy ring of bliss”

and then your children will love it too well to wander.

But I was now about to leave Wanstead, and, although delighted to be rid of the surveillance of a cross old relation, there were some things which threw an air of sadness occasionally over my mind. There were many pleasant associations connected with the place; its beautiful park, with herds of timid deer grazing under its tall oaks, upon whose green old heads the sun had shone for centuries; the venerable mansion, seated like a queen amid the sylvan scene; the old parish church, with its gorgeously painted windows, to which I had often walked on the Sabbath with my fellow-scholars in the Sabbath school, and beside whose deep-toned organ I had sat listening to the learned priest; the annual hunt at Easter, in which I had often joined the crew of idle lads that gave chase to the distracted deer; and the pleasant walks, made cheerful by the songs of innumerable birds, in Epping forest, were all to be left--perhaps forever. This thought made me somewhat sad, but it was swallowed up in the joy I felt when my mother appeared to conduct me to Bladen, some sixty miles from London, which was the place of her abode since her marriage.

Behold me then, gentle reader, seated with my mother on the outside of a stage-coach, with some ten fellow-passengers. The stage-coach of England is quite a different vehicle from the carriage known by that name in America. True, it is drawn by four horses, and it runs on four wheels, but here the likeness ends; instead of being built to carry twelve persons inside, it carries but six, while outside it has seats for twelve. Three or four passengers ride very comfortably behind, in what is called the basket, which is the territory of the guard, as the boot before is of the coachman. All mail coaches, and all others travelling in the night, carry a guard, or an armed man, for the purpose of protecting the coach from the attacks of footpads or highway robbers.

The dullness of our journey was somewhat relieved, after a long season of silence, by the distress of an unfortunate passenger, who, falling asleep, nodded so violently, that his hat, supposing it was receiving notice to quit, very unceremoniously took leave of the skull it covered, and plunged into the mud. The outcry of the poor passenger, who was soon waked by the wind sporting amid his hair, and his unavailing requests to stop the stage, put us all into good humor with ourselves and with each other.

We had another source of relief in the antics of a wild, hair-brained sailor. From spinning yarns, which looked amazingly like new inventions, he would take to dancing on the roof of the coach; at the foot of a hill he would leap off, and then spring up again with the agility of a monkey, to the no small amusement of the passengers. The more I saw of this reckless, thoughtless tar, the more enamored I became with the idea of a sea life; and thus this journey to my mother’s new abode was another link in the chain that decided my future destiny in the drama of life. How strangely and imperceptibly do small events tend to unexpected results. A match may fire a city and lay desolate the work of ages; a single leak may sink a bark and carry desolation to a hundred firesides--and trifles in the daily scenes of human life, give character to our immortality. We cannot, therefore, too carefully watch the influence of small events, especially on young minds.