Nat the Naturalist A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas

Excerpt

Why I went to my Uncle’s.

“I don’t know what to do with him. I never saw such a boy—a miserable little coward, always in mischief and doing things he ought not to do, and running about the place with his whims and fads. I wish you’d send him right away, I do.”

My aunt went out of the room, and I can’t say she banged the door, but she shut it very hard, leaving me and my uncle face to face staring one at the other.

My uncle did not speak for some minutes, but sat poking at his hair with the waxy end of his pipe, for he was a man who smoked a great deal after dinner; the mornings he spent in his garden, being out there as early as five o’clock in the summer and paying very little attention to the rain.

He was a very amiable, mild-tempered man, who had never had any children, in fact he did not marry till quite late in life; when I remember my poor father saying that it was my aunt married my uncle, for uncle would never have had the courage to ask her.

I say “my poor father”, for a couple of years after that marriage, the news came home that he had been lost at sea with the whole of the crew of the great vessel of which he was the surgeon.

I remember it all so well; the terrible blank and trouble that seemed to have come upon our house, with my mother’s illness that followed, and that dreadful day when Uncle Joseph came down-stairs to me in the dining-room, and seating himself by the fire filled and lit his pipe, took two or three puffs, and then threw the pipe under the grate, let his head go down upon his hands, and cried like a child.

A minute or two later, when I went up to him in great trouble and laid my hand upon his shoulder, saying, “Don’t cry, uncle; she’ll be better soon,” he caught me in his arms and held me to his breast.

“Nat, my boy,” he said, “I’ve promised her that I’ll be like a father to you now, and I will.”

I knew only too soon why he said those words, for a week later I was an orphan boy indeed; and I was at Uncle Joseph’s house, feeling very miserable and unhappy in spite of his kind ways and the pains he took to make me comfortable.

I was not so wretched when I was alone with uncle in the garden, where he would talk to me about his peas and potatoes and the fruit-trees, show me how to find the snails and slugs, and encourage me to shoot at the thieving birds with a crossbow and arrow; but I was miserable indeed when I went in, for my aunt was a very sharp, acid sort of woman, who seemed to have but one idea, and that was to keep the house so terribly tidy that it was always uncomfortable to the people who were in it.

It used to be, “Nat, have you wiped your shoes?”

“Let me look, sir. Ah! I thought so. Not half wiped. Go and take them off directly, and put on your slippers. You’re as bad as your uncle, sir.”

I used to think I should like to be as good.

“I declare,” said my aunt, “I haven’t a bit of peace of my life with the dirt and dust. The water-cart never comes round here as it does in the other roads, and the house gets filthy....