But who buys ale buys nothing els.

And the pilgrims feigned credulity according as they valued Master
Simon's opinion of their intelligence.

But most welcome of all were the merchant-captains from Ponteglos,
among whom custom had made it a point of honour to report themselves
at the "Flowing Source" within twenty-four hours after dropping
anchor by Ponteglos Quay. When or why or how the custom arose nobody
was old enough to remember; but a master mariner would as soon have
thought of sailing without log or leadline as of putting in and out
of Ponteglos without tasting Master Simon's ale--"calling for
orders," as they put it. Master Simon had never climbed a sea-going
ship except to shake hands with a friend and wish him good passage
and return to shore with the pilot; but the teak walls of his parlour
were lined with charts of such very remote parts of the globe, and
his shelves with such a quantity of foreign china and marine
curiosities, and he spoke so familiarly of Galapagos, Batavia, Cape
Verde, the Horn, the Straits of Magellan, and so forth, and would
bring his telescope so knowingly to bear on the gilt weathercock over
Ponteglos church tower, that until you knew the truth you would have
sworn half his life had been spent on the quarter-deck. And while
the sea-captains--serious men, attired in blue cloth, wearing rings
in their ears--sat and smoked canaster and other queer tobaccos in
painted china pipes, and talked of countries whose very names
conjured up visions of parrots, and carved idols, and sharks, and
brown natives in flashing canoes, Master Simon would put a shrewd
question or two and wag his head over the answers as a man who hears
just what he expected. And sometimes towards the close of the
sitting, if he knew his company very well, he would reward them with
his favourite and only song, "The Golden Vanitee":

A ship I have got in the North Countree,
And I had her christened the Golden Vanitee;
O, I fear she's been taken by a Spanish Gal-a-lee,
As she sailed by the Lowlands low!

In some hazy way he had persuaded himself that the Spanish galleon of
the ballad was the very ship whose timbers over-arched him and his
audience; and for the moment, being himself inverted (so to speak) by
the potency of his own singing, he blew out his chest and straddled
out his thick calves and screwed up his eyes, quite as if his
roof-tree were right-side-up once more in blue wat