There is Sorrow On The Sea

I

"YORK FACTORY, HUDSON'S BAY,
"23rd September, 1747.

"MY DEAR COUSIN FANNY,--It was a year last April Fool's Day, I left you
on the sands there at Mablethorpe, no more than a stone's throw from the
Book-in-Hand Inn, swearing that you should never see me or hear from me
again. You remember how we saw the coast-guards flash their lights here
and there, as they searched the sands for me? how one came bundling down
the bank, calling, 'Who goes there?' You remember that when I said, 'A
friend,' he stumbled, and his light fell to the sands and went out, and
in the darkness you and I stole away: you to your home, with a
whispering, 'God-bless-you, Cousin Dick,' over your shoulder, and I with
a bit of a laugh that, maybe, cut to the heart, and that split in a sob
in my own throat--though you didn't hear that.

"'Twas a bad night's work that, Cousin Fanny, and maybe I wish it undone,
and maybe I don't; but a devil gets into the heart of a man when he has
to fly from the lass he loves, while the friends of his youth go hunting
him with muskets, and he has to steal out of the backdoor of his own
country and shelter himself, like a cold sparrow, up in the eaves of the
world.

"Ay, lass, that's how I left the fens of Lincolnshire a year last April
Fool's Day. There wasn't a dyke from, Lincoln town to Mablethorpe that I
hadn't crossed with a running jump; and there wasn't a break in the
shore, or a sink-hole in the sand, or a clump of rushes, or a samphire
bed, from Skegness to Theddlethorpe, that I didn't know like every line
of your face. And when I was a slip of a lad-ay, and later too--how you
and I used to snuggle into little nooks of the sand-hills, maybe just
beneath the coast-guard's hut, and watch the tide come swilling
in-water-daisies you used to call the breaking surf, Cousin Fanny. And
that was like you, always with a fancy about everything you saw. And when
the ships, the fishing-smacks with their red sails, and the tall-masted
brigs went by, taking the white foam on their canvas, you used to wish
that you might sail away to the lands you'd heard tell of from old
skippers that gathered round my uncle's fire in the Book-in-Hand. Ay, a
grand thing I thought it would be, too, to go riding round the world on a
well-washed deck, with plenty of food and grog, and maybe, by-and-by, to
be first mate, and lord it from fo'castle bunk to stern-rail.

"You did not know, did you, who was the coast-guardsman that stumbled as
he came on us that night? It looked a stupid thing to do that, and let
the lantern fall. But, lass, 'twas done o' purpose. That was the one man
in all the parish that would ha' risked his neck to let me free. 'Twas
Lancy Doane, who's give