.«
    »That I will!« said the widow, radiant with pleasure, and she took one of
Clive's hands and pressed it for an instant; and from Clive's father's kind face
there beamed out that benediction which always made his countenance appear to me
among the most beautiful of human faces.
 

                                  Chapter XXIV

        In Which the Newcome Brothers Once More Meet Together in Unity.

This narrative, as the judicious reader no doubt is aware, is written maturely
and at ease, long after the voyage is over whereof it recounts the adventures
and perils, the winds adverse and favourable, the storms, shoals, shipwrecks,
islands, and so forth, which Clive Newcome met in his early journey in life. In
such a history events follow each other without necessarily having a connection
with one another. One ship crosses another ship, and after a visit from one
captain to his comrade, they sail away each on his course. The Clive Newcome
meets a vessel which makes signals that she is short of bread and water; and
after supplying her, our captain leaves her, to see her no more. One or two of
the vessels with which we commenced the voyage together part company in a gale,
and founder miserably; others, after being woefully battered in the tempest,
make port, or are cast upon surprising islands where all sorts of unlooked-for
prosperity await the lucky crew. Also, no doubt, the writer of the book, into
whose hands Clive Newcome's logs have been put, and who is charged with the duty
of making two octavo volumes out of his friend's story, dresses up the narrative
in his own way; utters his own remarks in plaice of Newcome's; makes fanciful
descriptions of individuals and incidents with which he never could have been
personally acquainted; and commits blunders, which the critics will discover. A
great number of the descriptions in »Cook's Voyages,« for instance, were
notoriously invented by Dr. Hawkesworth, who did the book; so in the present
volumes, where dialogues are written down, which the reporter could by no
possibility have heard, and where motives are detected which the persons
actuated by them certainly never confided to the writer, the public must once
for all be warned that the author's individual fancy very likely supplies much
of the narrative, and that he forms it as best he may, out of stray papers,
conversations reported to him, and his knowledge, right or wrong, of the
characters of the persons engaged. And as is the case with the most orthodox
histories