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Updated: May 4, 2025
When the Condor and the Ringdove happened to be in port together, she would frequently ask him to bring Captain Eliott to dinner. They had not met often since those old days. Not once in five years, perhaps.
"There can no longer be any doubt!" exclaimed the captain of the Proserpine, dropping his glass, with vexation too strongly painted in his manner to be mistaken; "that is a ship; and, as you say, Winchester, it must be the Ringdove; though what the devil Lyon is doing away in there with her, unless he sees something close under the land, is more than I can tell.
When the captain was gone, and I was left standing alone, my thoughts again recurred to the subject of impressment, which had so completely engrossed the minds of the crew that morning; and I thought to myself, "Suppose some crafty, determined, unscrupulous officer of the Ringdove, or some other British vessel, should be at this very time on shore, lounging about the wharves, disguised as an inoffensive citizen, but watching an opportunity to pounce upon a poor unfortunate fellow, like myself, and bear him off in triumph, to become a victim of the cat-o'-nine-tails at the gangway, or food for gunpowder."
It dries the pale grass, and rustles the restless shrunken leaves on the ground; it dries the grey lichen on the beech trunks; it swings the fledglings in the rooks' nests, and carries the ringdove on a speedier wing. Blackbirds whistle all around, the woods are full of them; willow-wrens plaintively sing in the trees; other birds call the dry wind mingles their notes.
Dearer than wild cataracts or Alpine glens are the still hidden streams which Bewick has immortalized in his vignettes, and Creswick in his pictures; the long glassy shallow, paved with yellow gravel, where he wades up between low walls of fern-fringed rock, beneath nut, and oak, and alder, to the low bar over which the stream comes swirling and dimpling, as the water-ouzel flits piping before him, and the murmur of the ringdove comes soft and sleepy through the wood.
Her voice quivered, despite herself, at the last words, and she began to bustle about the room filled Waife's pipe, thrust it into his hands with a laugh, the false mirth of which went to his very heart, and then stepped from the open window into the little garden, and began to sing one of Waife's favourite simple old Border songs; but before she got through the first line, the song ceased, and she was was as lost to sight as a ringdove, whose note comes and goes so quickly amongst the impenetrable coverts.
I was scarcely conscious of what else happened. When I came to myself, I found Lory perched on my hammock looking at me, and I was told that I was on board the Ringdove, and that after she had touched at a few of the East India Islands, she was homeward bound. I was treated very kindly till I got well, and then as I had no wish to be idle, I told the captain I was ready to work with the crew.
The hint was a broad one. Wade read, "Ringdove, Successor to late P. Purtett." "It's worth a try to get in here out of the pagan barbarism around. I'll propose as a lodger to the widow." So said Wade, and rang the bell under the roses. A pretty, slim, delicate, fair-haired maiden answered. "This explains the roses and the melodeon," thought Wade, and asked, "Can I see your mother?" Mamma came.
"Stones don't fall from the sky," Conseil said, "or else they deserve to be called meteorites." A second well-polished stone removed a tasty ringdove leg from Conseil's hand, giving still greater relevance to his observation. We all three stood up, rifles to our shoulders, ready to answer any attack. "Apes maybe?" Ned Land exclaimed. "Nearly," Conseil replied. "Savages." "Head for the skiff!"
Their coo is not in any sense tuneful; yet it has a pleasant association; for the ringdove is pre-eminently the bird of the woods and forests, and rightly named the wood-pigeon. Yet though so associated with the deepest and most lonely woods, here they were close to the house and garden, constantly heard, and almost always visible; and London, too, so near.
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