cut. And then--but every boy has rehearsed this
familiar piece a score of times. You are magnanimous, in fine--that goes
without saying; you have a coal-black horse, and a sabre-cut, and you
can afford to be very magnanimous. But all the same you give them a good
talking-to.

This pleasant conceit simply ravished my soul for some twenty minutes,
and then the old sense of injury began to well up afresh, and to call
for new plasters and soothing syrups. This time I took refuge in happy
thoughts of the sea. The sea was my real sphere, after all. On the sea,
in especial, you could combine distinction with lawlessness, whereas the
army seemed to be always weighted by a certain plodding submission to
discipline. To be sure, by all accounts, the life was at first a rough
one. But just then I wanted to suffer keenly; I wanted to be a poor
devil of a cabin boy, kicked, beaten, and sworn at--for a time. Perhaps
some hint, some inkling of my sufferings might reach their ears. In
due course the sloop or felucca would turn up--it always did--the
rakish-looking craft, black of hull, low in the water, and bristling
with guns; the jolly Roger flapping overhead, and myself for sole
commander. By and by, as usually happened, an East Indiaman would come
sailing along full of relations--not a necessary relation would be
missing. And the crew should walk the plank, and the captain should
dance from his own yardarm, and then I would take the passengers
in hand--that miserable group of well-known figures cowering on the
quarterdeck!--and then--and then the same old performance: the air thick
with magnanimity. In all the repertory of heroes, none is more truly
magnanimous than your pirate chief.

When at last I brought myself back from the future to the actual
present, I found that these delectable visions had helped me over a
longer stretch of road than I had imagined; and I looked around and took
my bearings. To the right of me was a long low building of grey stone,
new, and yet not smugly so; new, and yet possessing distinction,
marked with a character that did not depend on lichen or on crumbling
semi-effacement of moulding and mullion. Strangers might have been
puzzled to classify it; to me, an explorer from earliest years, the
place was familiar enough. Most folk called it "The Settlement"; others,
with quite sufficient conciseness for our neighbourhood, spoke of "them
there fellows up by Halliday's"; others again, with a hint of derisi