he thought, when he quoted Bradlaugh—­whose name was nearly all I knew of that famous man—­that he was becoming extremely modern, and a little too strong for my conventional and sensitive mind.  But here he was, telling of Incas, Aztecs, and Toltecs, of buried cities, of forgotten treasures, though mainly of the mind, of Montezuma, of the quetzal bird, and of the vanished splendour of nations that are now but a few weathered stones.  It was the forlorn stones, lost in an uninhabited wilderness, to which he constantly returned.  A brother of his, who had been there, perhaps had dropped a word once into Pascoe’s ear while his accustomed weapon was uplifted over a dock-labourer’s boot-heel, and this was what that word had done.  Pascoe, with a sort of symbolic gesture, rose from his bobbing foot before me, tore the shoe from it, flung it contemptuously on the floor, and approached me with a flamboyant hammer.

And that evening I feared for a moment that Pascoe was spoiled for me.  He had admitted me to a close view of some secret treasured charms of his memory, and believing that I was not uninterested, now, of course, he would be always displaying, for the ease of his soul, supposing we had a fellowship and a bond, his fascinating quetzals and Toltecs.  Yet I never heard any more about them.  There was another subject though, quite homely, seeing where we both lived, and equally absorbing for us both.  He knew our local history, as far as our ships and house-flags were concerned, from John Company’s fleet to the Macquarie.  He knew, by reputation, many of our contemporary master mariners.  He knew, and how he had learned it was as great a wonder as though he spoke Chinese, a fair measure of naval architecture.  He could discuss ships’ models as some men would Greek drama.  He would enter into the comparative merits of rig suitable for small cruising craft with a particularity which, now and then, gave me a feeling almost akin to alarm; because in a man of Pascoe’s years this fond insistence on the best furniture for one’s own little ship went beyond fair interest, and became the day-dreaming of romantic and rebellious youth.  At that point he was beyond my depth.  I had forgotten long ago, though but half Pascoe’s age, what my ship was to be like, when I got her at last.  Knowing she would never be seen at her moorings, I had, in a manner of speaking, posted her as a missing ship.

One day I met at his door the barge-builder into whose cavernous loft I had stumbled on my first visit to Pascoe.  He said it was a fine afternoon.  He invited me in to inspect a figure-head he had purchased.  “How’s the old ’un?” he asked, jerking a thumb towards the bootmaker’s.  Then, with some amused winking and crafty tilting of his chin, he signed to me to follow him along his loft.  He led me clean through the port-light of his cave, and down a length of steps outside to his yard on the foreshore of the Thames, where, among his barges hauled up for repairs, he paused by a formless shape covered by tarpaulins.