Had it not been so I should have sent you to the town to help with the shore end of my affairs, and then you would have been there still and I should have had no admiral to write my log and straighten my accounts." Sometimes, in his quieter moods, when there was no provocation to send pistol-balls between two sailors quietly conversing, or to perform some other demoniac trick, Blackbeard would talk to Dickory and ask all manner of questions, some of which the young man answered, while some he tried not to answer.

Thus it was that the pirate found out a great deal more about Dickory's life, hope, and sorrows than the young fellow imagined that he made known.

He discovered that Dickory was greatly interested in Bonnet's daughter, and wished above all other things in this world to get to her and to be with her.
This was a little out of the common run of things among the brotherhood; it was their fashion to forget, so far as they were able, the family ties which already belonged to them, and to make no plans for any future ties of that sort which they might be able to make.

Such a thing amused the generally rampant Blackbeard, but if this Dickory boy whom they had on board really did wish to marry some one, the idea came into the crafty mind of Blackbeard that he would like to attend to that marrying himself.

It pleased him to have a finger in every pie, and now here was a pie in the fingering of which he might take a novel interest.
This renowned desperado, this bloody cutthroat, this merciless pirate possessed a home--a quiet little English home on the Cornwall coast, where the cheerful woods and fields stretched down almost in reach of the sullen sea.