Free The Two Admirals by James Fenimore Cooper Page B

Wycherly, as he observed the husband to hesitate; "she
sometimes favours me with her company."
    "I rather think she will to-day, Sir Wycherly, if Mildred is well enough
to go; the good woman seldom lets her daughter stray far from her
apron-strings. She keeps her, as I tell her, within the sweep of her own
hawse, Sir Gervaise."
    "So much the wiser she, Master Dutton," returned the admiral, pointedly.
"The best pilot for a young woman is a good mother; and now you have a
fleet in your roadstead, I need not tell a seaman of your experience
that you are on pilot-ground;—hey! Atwood?"
    Here the parties separated, Dutton remaining uncovered until his
superior had turned the corner of his little cottage, and was fairly out
of sight. Then the master entered his dwelling to prepare his wife and
daughter for the honours they had in perspective. Before he executed
this duty, however, the unfortunate man opened what he called a
locker—what a housewife would term a cupboard—and fortified his nerves
with a strong draught of pure Nantes; a liquor that no hostilities,
custom-house duties, or national antipathies, has ever been able to
bring into general disrepute in the British Islands. In the mean time
the party of the two baronets pursued its way towards the Hall.
    The village, or hamlet of Wychecombe, lay about half-way between the
station and the residence of the lord of the manor. It was an
exceedingly rural and retired collection of mean houses, possessing
neither physician, apothecary, nor attorney, to give it importance. A
small inn, two or three shops of the humblest kind, and some twenty
cottages of labourers and mechanics, composed the place, which, at that
early day, had not even a chapel, or a conventicle; dissent not having
made much progress then in England. The parish church, one of the old
edifices of the time of the Henrys, stood quite alone, in a field, more
than a mile from the place; and the vicarage, a respectable abode, was
just on the edge of the park, fully half a mile more distant. In short,
Wychecombe was one of those places which was so far on the decline, that
few or no traces of any little importance it may have once possessed,
were any longer to be discovered; and it had sunk entirely into a hamlet
that owed its allowed claims to be marked on the maps, and to be noted
in the gazetteers, altogether to its antiquity, and the name it had
given to one of the oldest knightly families in England.
    No wonder then, that the arrival of a fleet under the head, produced a
great excitement in the little village. The anchorage was excellent, so
far as the bottom was concerned, but it could scarcely be called a
roadstead in any other point of view, since there was shelter against no
wind but that which blew directly off shore, which happened to be a wind
that did not prevail in that part of the island. Occasionally, a small
cruiser would come-to, in the offing, and a few frigates had lain at
single anchors in the roads, for a tide or so, in waiting for a change
of weather; but this was the first fleet that had been known to moor
under the cliffs within the memory of man. The fog had prevented the
honest villagers from ascertaining the unexpected honour that had been
done them, until the reports of the two guns reached their ears, when
the important intelligence spread with due rapidity over the entire
adjacent country. Although Wychecombe did not lie in actual view of the
sea, by the time the party of Sir Wycherly entered the hamlet, its
little street was already crowded with visiters from the fleet; every
vessel having sent at least one boat ashore, and many of them some three
or four. Captain's and gun-room stewards, midshipmen's foragers,
loblolly boys, and other similar harpies, were out in scores; for this
was a part of the world in which bum-boats were unknown; and if the
mountain would not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must fain go to the
mountain. Half an hour had sufficed to exhaust all the