Читать книгу Adventures and Recollections - Bill o'th' Hoylus End - Страница 33

Table of Contents

I determined that as soon as ever I got into Hull I would make straight for Keighley. Many a time on the vessel did I think of Mrs. Hemans’s beautiful poem “There’s no place like home.” I shall never forget, I think, the feelings of ecstacy with which I was seized on the vessel sailing into the port of Hull. It was four o’ clock on a cold, dreary December afternoon, and I could not help but cry as, going on the quay, I heard an organ grinder giving off the strains “Home, Sweet Home!”

Of all the spots on earth to me

Is Home, Sweet Home.

And that dear spot I long to see—

My Home, Sweet Home.

Where joyfully relations meet,

Where neighbours do each other greet.

If ought on earth there can be sweet,

’Tis Home, Sweet Home.

It seemed to me as if my father and mother were calling their prodigal son home. I straightened myself up, and says: “Here goes for Keighley, without a ha’penny in my pocket:” the skipper was not by any means kind-hearted, and did not give me even an “honorarium.” But my troubles were not by any means past and gone: many who read these lines will, I trow, know what it is to tramp a long distance with a purse, as Carlyle said, “so flabby that it could scarcely be thrown against the wind.” My trudge from Hull to Bradford seemed beset with thorny places.