Read "Eric, a Waif" by Emma Leslie online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
LIMEHOUSE HOLE in the last century was a place of some importance, for from this port wherries for Tilbury, Gravesend, and other places started with goods and passengers, to meet the larger vessels bound for distant shores.
A few weeks after the death of Eric's master, a party of weary, woe-begone travellers arrived at Limehouse Hole, under the charge of several gaolers, for they were all prisoners under sentence of transportation to His Majesty's plantations of America. Here they would be sold as slaves to the settlers-Englishmen, like themselves, who had gone out earlier from the mother country and settled there as farmers or traders, each growing richer and more independent every year.