“Nonsense, Billy; the voice I hear is always quite cheerful and friendly—­not a bit like a dead man’s.”

“I tell what I’m told,” answered Billy, and the subject dropped.

But the boy did not cease thinking about the voice; and some time after he came, as it seemed, upon a clue.  His father had set him to read Shakespeare; and, taking down the first of twelve volumes from the shelf, he began upon the first play, The Tempest.  He was prepared to yawn, but the first scene flung open a door to him, and he stepped into a new world, a childish Ferdinand roaming an Isle of Voices.  He resigned Miranda to the grown-up prince, for whom (as he saw at a glance, being wise in the ways of story-books) she was eminently fitted.  It was in Ariel, perched with harp upon the shrouds of the king’s ship, that he recognised the unseen familiar of his own voyaging.  “O spirit, be my friend—­speak to me often!” As children will, he gave Prospero’s island a local habitation in the tangled cliff-garden, tethered Caliban in the tool-shed, and watched the white surf far withdrawn, or listened to its murmur between the lordly boles of the red-currant bushes.  For the first time he became aware of some limitations in Billy.

He had long been aware of some serious limitations in his nurse:  she could not, for instance, sail a boat, and her only knot was a “granny.”  He never dreamed of despising her, being an affectionate boy; but more and more he went his own way without consulting her.  Yet it was she who—­unconsciously and quite as if it were nothing out of the way—­ handed him the clue.

A flagstaff stood in the garden on a grassy platform, half-way down the cliff-side, and the boy at his earnest wish had been given charge of it.  On weekdays, as a rule he hoisted two flags—­an ensign on the gaff, and a single code-flag at the mast-head; but on Sundays he usually ran up three or four, and with the help of the code-book spelt out some message to the harbour.  Sometimes, too, if an old friend happened to take up her moorings at the red buoy below, he would have her code-letters hoisted to welcome her, or would greet and speed her with such signals as K.T.N., “Glad to see you,” and B.R.D., or B.Q.R., meaning “Good-bye,” “A pleasant passage.”  Skippers fell into the habit of dipping their flags to him as they were towed out to sea, and a few amused themselves while at anchor by pulling out their bags of bunting and signalling humorous conversations, though their topmasts reached so near to the boy’s platform that they might with less labour have talked through a speaking-trumpet.

One morning before Christmas six vessels lay below at the buoy, moored stem to stem in two tiers of three; and, after hoisting his signal (C.P.B.H. for “Christmas Eve"), he ran indoors with the news that all six were answering with bushes of holly at their topmast heads, while one—­a Danish barquentine—­had rove stronger halliards and carried a tall fir-tree at the main, its branches reaching many feet above her truck.