all modern creeds; indeed,
Kettle preached as much, and one can take a melancholy pride in splendid
isolation.

I am not sure that Captain Kettle does not find the restfulness of his
present life a trifle too accentuated at times, though this is only
inevitable for one who has been so much a man of action. But at any rate
he never makes complaint. He is a strong man, and he governs himself
even as he governs his family and the chapel circle, with a strong, just
hand. The farm is a model of neatness and order; paint is lavished in a
way that makes dalesmen lift their eyebrows; and the routine of the
household is as strict as that of a ship.

The house is unique, too, in Wharfedale for the variety of its contents.
Desperately poor though Kettle might be on many of his returns from his
unsuccessful ventures, he never came back to his wife without some
present from a foreign clime as a tangible proof of his remembrance, and
because these were usually mere curiosities, without intrinsic value,
they often evaded the pawn-shop in those years of dire distress, when
more negotiable articles passed irretrievably away from the family
possession. And with them too, in stiff, decorous frames, are those
certificates and testimonials which a master mariner always collects,
together with photographs of gratuitously small general interest.

But one might turn the house upside down without finding so carnal an
instrument as a revolver, and when I suggested to Kettle once that we
might go outside and have a little pistol practice, he glared at me, and
I thought he would have sworn. However, he let me know stiffly enough
that whatever circumstances might have made him at sea, he had always
been a very different man ashore in England, and there the
matter dropped.

But speaking of mementoes, there is one link with the past that Mrs.
Kettle, poor woman, never ceases to regret the loss of. "Such a
beautiful gold watch," she says it was too, "with the Emperor's and the
Captain's names engraved together on the back, and just a nice mention
of the _Gross of Carl_." As it happened, I saw the letter with which it
was returned. It ran like this:--

_To His Majesty the German Emperor,
Berlin, Germany

S.S. "Flamingo,"
Liverpool,

Sir,

I am in receipt of watch sent by your agent, the German
ambassador in London, which I return herewith. It is not my
custom to accept presents from people I don't k