t customs and giving
a taste of its language. He had been simple, sincere, and natural
from first to last, and when the time had come for the Prince to
return to his ship he had presented his six sons to him with the
quiet dignity of a patriarch, saying these were his gifts to his king
that was to be. Then on the quay he had offered the Prince his hand,
hoping he might see him again before long; for he was a great lover
of a happy face, and the Prince, it was plain to see, was, like
himself, a man of a cheerful spirit.

But when the _Royal George_ had sailed out of the bay at the top of
the tide, and the great folk who had held their breath in awe of so
much majesty were preparing to celebrate the visit with the blazing
of cannon and the beating of drums, Adam Fairbrother had silently
slipped away. He lived at Government House, but had left his three
elder boys at Lague, and thought this a happy chance of spending a
night at home. Only his sons' housekeeper, a spinster aunt of his
own, was there, and when she had given him a bite of supper he had
sent her after the others to look at the sights of Ramsey. Then he
had drawn up his chair before the fire, charged his long pipe, purred
a song to himself, begun to smoke, to doze, and to dream.

His dreams that night had been woven with vision of his bad days in
the slave factory at Barbary--of his wreck and capture, of his cruel
tortures before his neck was yet bowed to the yoke of bondage, of the
whip, before he knew the language of his masters to obey it quickly,
of the fetters on his hands, the weights on his legs, the collar
about his neck, of the raw flesh where the iron had torn the skin;
and then of the dark wild night of his escape when he and three
others, as luckless and as miserable, had run a raft into the sea,
stripped off their shirts for a sail, and thrust their naked bodies
together to keep them warm.

Such was the gray silt that came up to him that night from the
deposits of his memory. The Tynwald, the Prince, the Duke, the guns,
the music, the bonfires, were gone; bit by bit he pieced together the
life he had lived in his youth, and at the thought of it, and that it
was now over, he threw back his head and gave thanks where they were
due.

At that moment he heard a tap at the windowpane, and turning about he
saw a man's haggard face peering in at him from the darkness. Then he
rose instantly, and threw open the door of the porch.

"Come in," he calle