illations of her masts, she felt the
tug of the waters around her keel. There had been a storm the night
before; without, the sea ran strong about all these exposed coasts; and
I knew that, hidden from sight behind the upper headland, the surf must
be bursting in a cloud over the Brown Cow, and the perturbed tide
setting like a mill-race between that great dun rock and the shore
through the narrow gut we called the Cat's Mouth.

"You'll be noticing some changes, Mr. Nick?" the carrier hinted at last,
lingering to observe me. "Well, there's a deal may happen in two or
three years. You can't look to find things just the way you left 'em."

He used a certain respectful familiarity, having known me all my life,
and, as he spoke, eyed me with the kind and open curiosity of a dog. He
was a gentle little man, with a manner oddly compounded of the sailor's
simplicity and the rustic's bootless cunning,--for he had followed both
walks in his day,--and was popularly held to be somewhat weak-witted
since a fall from the masthead to the decks of the brig _Hyperion_ some
years before.

"I am not near enough to see any changes yet, Crump," I answered him.
"The changes, if any, show most, I dare say, in myself."

"So they do, sir; so they do," he assented heartily. "My wife used to
say you were a pretty boy, and had the makings of a fine, personable
man. First thing I thought, when I clapped eyes on you to-day, was:
'Well, this here's a lesson to Sarah not to be hasty in her judgments!'
'Tain't often I get the better o' Sarah, you know, sir. They tell me
you've been in Italy and learned to paint?"

"I'm afraid I haven't quite learned all the art yet, Crump. It takes
more than two or three years."

"Depends on the person, I shouldn't wonder," he said, wagging his head.
"Some people are slow by nature. Could a man make his living by it, d'ye
think, sir?"

I answered this devious inquiry as to my own financial standing by
assuring him that I had contrived so far to make mine. "I'm not riding
in my coach-and-four yet, as you see, Crump, but the time may come."

"I'm sure I hope it will, Mr. Nick," he said rather dubiously. "But it's
kind o' tempting Providence, seems to me. You might 'a' been walking
your own quarter-deck, captain o' some tall East Indiaman by this, like
your father and grandfather before you, making a safe, easy living, and
looked up to by everybody."

I interrupted his moralizing to ask, as, indeed, I had alrea