[Illustration:  “He took Mr. Chalk in a firm grasp and lowered him.”]

“There’s few gentlemen that would have come down at all with their foot asleep,” remarked Mr. Tasker, pocketing a shilling, when the captain’s back was turned.

Mr. Chalk, still pale and shaking somewhat, smiled feebly and followed the captain into the house.  The latter offered a cup of tea, which the visitor, after a faint protest, accepted, and taking a seat at the table gazed in undisguised admiration at the nautical appearance of the room.

“I could fancy myself aboard ship,” he declared.

“Are you fond of the sea?” inquired the captain.

“I love it,” said Mr. Chalk, fervently.  “It was always my idea from a boy to go to sea, but somehow I didn’t.  I went into my father’s business instead, but I never liked it.  Some people are fond of a stay-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 Chalk, with the stem of his long pipe withdrawn from his open mouth, would sit enthralled as his host narrated picturesque incidents of hairbreadth escapes, or, drawing his chair to the table, made rough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.”]