pe in the dining-room and slept in the house.
The lanky girl, upon the whole, was rather ashamed of him; the boy
was frankly and utterly indifferent in a straightforward, delightful,
unaffected way manly boys have.

And Captain MacWhirr wrote home from the coast of China twelve times
every year, desiring quaintly to be "remembered to the children," and
subscribing himself "your loving husband," as calmly as if the words so
long used by so many men were, apart from their shape, worn-out things,
and of a faded meaning.

The China seas north and south are narrow seas. They are seas full of
every-day, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand-banks, reefs, swift and
changeable currents--tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a seaman
in clear and definite language. Their speech appealed to Captain
MacWhirr's sense of realities so forcibly that he had given up his
state-room below and practically lived all his days on the bridge of
his ship, often having his meals sent up, and sleeping at night in the
chart-room. And he indited there his home letters. Each of them, without
exception, contained the phrase, "The weather has been very fine this
trip," or some other form of a statement to that effect. And this
statement, too, in its wonderful persistence, was of the same perfect
accuracy as all the others they contained.

Mr. Rout likewise wrote letters; only no one on board knew how chatty he
could be pen in hand, because the chief engineer had enough imagination
to keep his desk locked. His wife relished his style greatly. They were
a childless couple, and Mrs. Rout, a big, high-bosomed, jolly woman of
forty, shared with Mr. Rout's toothless and venerable mother a little
cottage near Teddington. She would run over her correspondence, at
breakfast, with lively eyes, and scream out interesting passages in a
joyous voice at the deaf old lady, prefacing each extract by the
warning shout, "Solomon says!" She had the trick of firing off
Solomon's utterances also upon strangers, astonishing them easily by the
unfamiliar text and the unexpectedly jocular vein of these quotations.
On the day the new curate called for the first time at the cottage, she
found occasion to remark, "As Solomon says: 'the engineers that go down
to the sea in ships behold the wonders of sailor nature';" when a change
in the visitor's countenance made her stop and stare.

"Solomon. . . . Oh! . . . Mrs. Rout," stuttered the young man, very red
in the face, "I