News of
captures by French privateers usually filtered through sooner or
later; but for long there were no tidings of the _Ouseburn Lassie_.
The Blacketts did what they could to console the bereaved parents, but
father and mother would not be comforted. At length, months
afterwards, they learnt in a casual way that a collier had been
captured off Yarmouth by a French privateer, about the time the
_Ouseburn Lassie_ was making her trip; at least that was the
construction the Yarmouth salts who saw the affair from the shore put
upon the movements of the two vessels. So a ray of hope came to
Fairburn and his wife.
"The lad will be somewhere in a French prison," the father said, "and
some day he will be set free and come home to us again."
The spring of 1703 brought Matthew Blackett's seventeenth birthday,
and with it an ensign's commission in a well-reputed regiment of foot.
He already stood six feet one in his stockings, and mighty proud he
felt when his lanky figure was clothed in his gay uniform.
"Perhaps I shall come across George in my wanderings," he said, when
he went to bid a very friendly adieu to the Fairburns. "Won't it be
jolly if we do meet!" And the parents were constrained to smile in
spite of their sadness.
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