-at-home
life, but I always had a hankering after adventures."

The captain shook his head. "Ha!" he said, impressively.

"You've had a few in your time," said Mr. Chalk, looking at him,
grudgingly; "Edward Tredgold was telling me so."

"Man and boy, I was at sea forty-nine years," remarked the captain.
"Naturally things happened in that time; it would have been odd if they
hadn't. It's all in a lifetime."

"Some lifetimes," said Mr. Chalk, gloomily. "I'm fifty-one next year,
and the only thing I ever had happen to me was seeing a man stop a
runaway horse and cart."

He shook his head solemnly over his monotonous career, and, gazing at a
war-club from Samoa which hung over the fireplace, put a few leading
questions to the captain concerning the manner in which it came into his
possession. When Prudence came in half an hour later he was still
sitting there, listening with rapt attention to his host's tales of
distant seas.

It was the first of many visits. Sometimes he brought Mr. Tredgold and
sometimes Mr. Tredgold brought him. The terrors of the crow's-nest
vanished before his persevering attacks, and perched there with the
captain's glass he swept the landscape with the air of an explorer
surveying a strange and hostile country.

It was a fitting prelude to the captain's tales afterwards, and Mr.
Chalk, with the stem of his long pipe withdrawn from his open mouth,
would sit enthralled as his host narrated picturesque incidents of
hairbreadth escapes, or, drawing his chair to the table, made rough maps
for his listener's clearer understanding. Sometimes the captain took him
to palm-studded islands in the Southern Seas; sometimes to the ancient
worlds of China and Japan. He became an expert in nautical terms. He
walked in knots, and even ordered a new carpet in fathoms--after the
shop-keeper had demonstrated, by means of his little boy's arithmetic
book, the difference between that measurement and a furlong.

[Illustration: "Sometimes the captain took him to palm-studded islands in
the Southern Seas."]

"I'll have a voyage before I'm much older," he remarked one afternoon, as
he sat in the captain's sitting-room. "Since I retired from business
time hangs very heavy sometimes. I've got a fancy for a small yacht, but
I suppose I couldn't go a long voyage in a small one?"

"Smaller the better," said Edward Tredgold, who was sitting by the window
watching Miss Drewitt sewing.

Mr. Chalk took his pip