THE ADVENTURES

OF

ROBIN DAY.

CHAPTER I.

The Neptunian origin of Robin Day; with an account of his early friends, Mother Moll and Skipper Duck, and his preferment to a fat office.

SYLLA, the Roman dictator, is, as far as I know, the only great man on record who attributed his advancement to good luck; all other great men being modestly content to refer their successes in life to their own merits; insisting, with the philosophers, that there is not, in reality, any such thing as luck at all, good, bad, or indifferent, but that every man's fortune, whether happy or evil, is referable to his own agency, the direct result of his own wise or foolish actions. Such may be the fact, for aught I can say, (it is a comfortable doctrinef or the fortunate,) and I do not pretend to controvert it; but of one thing I am very certain, namely, that whether there be bad luck in the world or not, there is an abundance of those unhappy personages who are commonly considered its victims-that is to say, unVOL. I.-2

lucky dogs; of which race I was undoubtedly born a member.

My introduction into the world was of itself sufficient to establish my claim to pre-eminence in misfortune; for, from all I was ever able to learn, instead of making my appearance in the usual way, I came ashore, one stormy night in September, in the year 1796, upon the coast of New Jersey, washed up by the sea, like a king-crab; with this advantage, however, that I had for my shell, or cradle, the battered hull of a Yankee schooner, which, if it did not keep me as dry and snug as was desirable, preserved me, at least, from being swallowed up by the raging billows. In other words, I was cast ashore in a wreck "name unknown," as the gazettes say, from which I was taken, a puny little bantling of some twelve or fifteen months old, half famished and half drowned, the only living creature, save two ducks that were soaking in a coop, and a broken-backed cat in the forecastle, that escaped.

The particulars of this eventful catastrophe, there were many good reasons why I, though so much interested in knowing them, should never succeed in making myself perfectly acquainted with. The scene of disaster was in the neighborhood of Barnegat, a place famous in the annals of shipwreck; and the vessel, there was little doubt, contained a rich freight of rum and sugar, and other West Indian products, which it was manifestly nobody's business to know how to account for. Besides, it was thought not improbable that the wreck of this particular_ schooner was owing less to the fury of the storm than to the instrumentality of the people of the coast -land pirates, as they have been called from time immemorial-who were often accused in past days, as sometimes in the present, of setting up false bea

cons, to decoy unsuspecting mariners to their ruin. I have even heard it said, there was a rumor at the time that the crew of the unfortunate vessel (whose disappearance could not be otherwise accounted for,) had met with foul play from the wreckers; which, if true, was a better reason than all for their keeping a veil of obscurity over the whole affair. But this rumor after all, had no better foundation than surmise, and a disposition on the part of malicious people to explain the disappearance of the crew, which was undoubtedly a very remarkable feature in the shipwreck, in the most unfavorable way. It was more charitable to suppose they had been suddenly washed from the deck by some furious billow, which had carried away every thing above board; and that I owed my preservation to being left nestling in the highest berth in the cabin, whence I was plucked by my robber preservers.

Another reason why the particulars were never known, was that no one interested ever made inquiry. No agent or emissary of owner or underwriter, as far as I could learn, ever visited the spot to investigate the circumstances attending the wreck, or attempt the recovery of the property lost: which, I suppose, was because the news of the disaster never travelled more than a dozen miles from the scene, and then only among people, who, whatever cause they might have to report the worst of it among themselves, had too much interest in the preservation of coast privileges-the uninterrupted enjoyment of flotsam and jetsam-to invite the interference of strangers and law officers. As for myself, I think the reader will allow, I was entirely too young to trouble myself in the matter; or, indeed, to know any thing about it. Who were my parents, or whether I had any, were questions which, as they

concerned nobody, so nobody cared to inquire. But, I believe, it was generally thought among those who had the first charge of me, I must have been the son of the ship's cook, as I had an inordinate love of good eating, with a judgment in dainties, which could only be expected from one who had been indulged in the fat of the caboose; besides showing, when I grew a year or two older, an extraordinary tact in roasting crabs and fiddlers, oysters and sand-eels, and such other stray edibles as I could lay my hands on.

My earliest recollections go back to some such scenes; and I have a vague remembrance that I lived a life of famine in a miserable hut by the sea-side, with an old beldam, who used to wear a sailor's tarpaulin hat and pea-jacket, and was, as I have been since informed, a very Semiramis among land-pirates, and had not only been engaged in robbing, but had been the actual cause of, more wrecks than any man on the coast. She had a wretched little starveling pony, whose legs she used to tie together of nights, and, having hung a lantern to his side, send him stumbling along the beach; in which operation, the motion of the lantern rocking up and down, had the appearance, to persons on the sea, of a light from a vessel sailing along the coast; and thus was undoubtedly sometimes the cause of the observers driving on shore, before they dreamed they were nigh it. Of this circumstance I have the better recollection as I myself was frequently sent out, especially in bitter stormy nights, when such stratagems were most practised, to keep the said pony to his duty, by whipping him up and down the sands; an employment in which if I at any time failed, by dropping asleep from cold or fatigue, or sneaking away under a sandhill, to shelter me from the winds, I was sure

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to be rewarded with such a drubbing as kept me in memory of my fault for a week after. I am pretty confident, indeed, it was with an eye to my future usefulness in this line of employment, that old Mother Moll, (for by that name they called her,) after helping herself to such other valuables in the wreck (which she was one of the first to enter) as she could lay hands on, deigned in like manner to add unlucky me to her share of plunder, and carry me to her hovel; where, first under the name of Sammy September-a title given me by the wreckers, in memory, I suppose, of the month of shipwreck, and, next, under that of Robin Rusty, which became, at last, the more frequent appellation-I had the satisfaction to be cuffed about from morning till night, and from one year's end to the other, until rescued by a change of fate from her intolerable clutches.

She had the greater need of some such assistant, as the only other being over whom she had any control, a reprobate son, called Isaac, or Ikey, was now grown a huge, hulking hobbledehoy of fourteen, was waxing day by day more restiff and intolerant of authority, and betraying every evidence of a manly inclination, sooner or later, to give her the slip, and set up in the world for himself. He was, assuredly, a most graceless and abandoned young scoundrel-a worthy son of such a parent; and I have a recollection of his communicating to me one day, which he did with much apparent satisfaction, his expectation, in about one year more, of being able to trounce, or, as he expressed it, to "lick," his mother; an idea, which, I must confess, was infinitely agreeable to my infant fancies, as it associated the prospect of my being able, in course of time, to do the same thing myself, and thereby requite some of the million afflic