ening to the story, and how delighted they were
with every little scrap they got of it, and how they remembered every
word of it, and how William wrote it down in black and white, and had it
safe and sound for future use,--little dreaming, at the time of doing
it, that the record he was keeping would find its way at last into a
book, and thus give other children than himself and Fred and Alice a
chance to make the acquaintance of the good old Captain and the brave
and handsome little Dean.

And William Earnest kept his record regularly, and he kept it well, as
we have seen before; and up to this point of time everything was set
down with day and date. But now a change had clearly come over the
habits of our little party. At first, as has been hitherto related, the
old Captain was a little shy of the children, though he so much liked
them; but now all formality was gone between them, and so down the
children came to the Captain's cottage whenever they had a mind. The
Captain was always glad to see them, be it morning, noon, or evening;
and never were the children, in all their lives before, so happy as when
romping through the Captain's grounds, or cooling themselves upon the
grass beneath the Captain's trees, or looking at the Captain's "traps"
or joking with that oddest boy that was ever seen, Main Brace, or
playing with the Captain's dogs,--the biggest dogs that ever bore the
odd names of Port and Starboard.

The Captain now said, "Make yourselves at home, my dears,--quite at
home"; and the children did it; and the Captain always went about
whatever he had to do until he was ready once more to begin his
story-telling; and then they would all rush off to the yacht, or to the
"Crow's Nest," or the "cabin," or the "quarter-deck," or some other
pleasant place; and as the Captain related something more and more
extraordinary, as it seemed to them, each time,

"the wonder grew
That one small head should carry all he knew";

while, as for the old man himself, he might well exclaim, with the lover
in the play, "I were but little happy if I could say how much."

Thus it came about, as we have good reason to suppose, that days and
dates were lost in William's journal; and thus it was that the young
and truthful chronicler of this veritable history simply wrote down,
from time to time, what the Captain said, without mentioning much about
when it was that the Captain said it. Sometimes he wrote with lead
pencil, sometimes w