Description
Charlie Bell is an English orphan, flung at a tender age upon the stormy sea of life, to sink or swim, as it should please Heaven. Friendless, starving on a wharf at Halifax, he ships in a vessel with men, who, under the guise of fishermen, are little better than pirates. Landing at Elm Island, they insult the wife of Lion Ben, who inflicts upon them a merited chastisement, and adopts the orphan.
In his boy life, and that of his young associates, their daily employments, and those exciting adventures which a new country, rude state of society, and a ragged reach of sea-coast afford to boys full of blue veins and vitriol, are seen the germs of qualities that ripen into characters of the greatest usefulness.