hermen's wives and their many children. The pier was musical with the
wash of the sea, the creaking of capstans and windlasses, and the airy
fluttering of little vanes and sails. The rough, sea-bleached boulders
of which the pier was made, and the whiter boulders of the shore, were
brown with drying nets. The red-brown cliffs, richly wooded to their
extremest verge, had their softened and beautiful forms reflected in the
bluest water, under the clear North Devonshire sky of a November day
without a cloud. The village itself was so steeped in autumnal foliage,
from the houses lying on the pier to the topmost round of the topmost
ladder, that one might have fancied it was out a bird's-nesting, and was
(as indeed it was) a wonderful climber. And mentioning birds, the place
was not without some music from them too; for the rook was very busy on
the higher levels, and the gull with his flapping wings was fishing in
the bay, and the lusty little robin was hopping among the great stone
blocks and iron rings of the breakwater, fearless in the faith of his
ancestors, and the Children in the Wood.

Thus it came to pass that Captain Jorgan, sitting balancing himself on
the pier-wall, struck his leg with his open hand, as some men do when
they are pleased--and as he always did when he was pleased--and said,--

"A mighty sing'lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all the days
of my life!"

Captain Jorgan had not been through the village, but had come down to the
pier by a winding side-road, to have a preliminary look at it from the
level of his own natural element. He had seen many things and places,
and had stowed them all away in a shrewd intellect and a vigorous memory.
He was an American born, was Captain Jorgan,--a New-Englander,--but he
was a citizen of the world, and a combination of most of the best
qualities of most of its best countries.

For Captain Jorgan to sit anywhere in his long-skirted blue coat and blue
trousers, without holding converse with everybody within speaking
distance, was a sheer impossibility. So the captain fell to talking with
the fishermen, and to asking them knowing questions about the fishery,
and the tides, and the currents, and the race of water off that point
yonder, and what you kept in your eye, and got into a line with what else
when you ran into the little harbour; and other nautical profundities.
Among the men who exchanged ideas with the captain was a young fellow,
who exac