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My father, with a sad smile, squeezed my hand and left me. Little boys are often very sensitive on points of what they consider manliness. They will laugh at this weakness when they grow older, but I think it is wise to humour them. I afterwards heard—but I did not then know—that my father when he stepped ashore walked straight to the building that was then called the Brunswick Hotel, and posting himself at a window where I could not see him, sat watching me with the tears in his eyes, until the ship had hauled through the lock gates and I was no longer visible.

No one who has stood on board a large sailing ship for the first time, and witnessed the proceeding of getting her under way, will wonder at the confusion my mind was in as the Lady Violet hauled out into the river, and at my inability therefore to recollect all that passed, I took very little heed of my father’s leaving the vessel. I stood lost in amazement, staring about me like a fool, my mouth wide open. I remember noticing the pier heads gliding past the ship as we warped out stern first; people standing on the quayside shouting to us, waving hats and handkerchiefs, some of them weeping; whilst our passengers in groups along the line of bulwarks responded to these farewells with kissing of hands, broken cries of “God bless you!” “Good-bye!” and the like. I remember the sharp shouts of the mate on the forecastle repeating the pilot’s orders, the half-tipsy chorusing of seamen heaving at the capstan, the figure of a fellow at the helm revolving the spokes, first one way, then another, the manœuvring of a little snorting tug to receive the line for the hawser by which our great ship was to be towed down the river. Nobody took any notice of me. I stood at the head of one of the poop ladders leaning against the rail, wondering at the swiftness with which the people on the pier heads, who continued to gesticulate towards us, were diminished into dwarf-like proportions.