"
Watty Scott was a scion of a good Scottish Border family, a youth
careless and harum-scarum as the most typical of middies, but a
gentleman, and popular alike with officers and men. He was about
eighteen, had already distinguished himself in more than one brush with
the enemy, and was looked on as a most promising officer. But now...!
"Oh, little did my mother ken,
The day she cradled me,"
(might he have wailed), in what dire scrape the recklessness inherent in
her boy would land him.
"I _thought_ you'd take my terms," said the landlady, when she came into
the room. "Faith! an' I've got the pick o' the basket! Well, come along,
my joker; we'll be off to the parson. But you'll take my arm all the
way, d'ye see!--as is right an' nat'ral for bride and bridegroom. You
ain't agoin' to give _me_ the slip afore the knot's tied, I can tell
you. Not if _I_ knows it, young man."
Broken clergymen, broken by drink or what not, ready to go through
anything for a consideration, were never hard to find in those days in a
town such as Portsmouth, and all too soon the ceremony, binding enough,
so far as Watty could see, was over. Then the new-made wife insisted,
before the three lads left her, that she should stand them a good
dinner, and as much wine as they cared to drink to the health of bride
and bridegroom.
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