CHAPTER SIX. 

JACK HAS A DESPERATE ENCOUNTER. 

We never can tell what a day or an hour may bring forth. This is a solemn fact on which young and old might frequently ponder with advantage, and on which we might enlarge to an unlimited extent; but our space will not admit of moralising very much, therefore we beg the reader to moralise on that, for him--or herself. The subject is none the less important, that circumstances require that it should be touched on in a slight, almost flippant, manner. 

Had Jack Robinson known what lay before him that evening, he would--he would have been a wiser man! Nothing more appropriate than that occurs to us at this moment. But, to be more particular:-- 

When the party reached the nets, Jack left them to attend to their work, and went off alone to the vats, some of which, measuring about six feet in diameter, were nearly full of fish in pickle. 

As he walked along the slight track which guided him towards them, he pondered the circumstances in which he then found himself, and, indulging in a habit which he had acquired in his frequent and prolonged periods of solitude, began to mutter his thoughts aloud. 

"So, so, Jack, you left your farm because you were tired of solitude, and now you find yourself in the midst of society. Pleasant society, truly!--bullies and geese, without a sympathetic mind to rub against. Humph! a pleasant fix you've got into, old fellow." 

Jack was wrong in this to some extent, as he afterwards came to confess to himself, for among his men there were two or three minds worth cultivating, noble and shrewd, and deep, too, though not educated or refined. But at the time of which we write, Jack did not know this. He went on to soliloquise: 
who was there?
 went off alone to the vats,