“There was a Phineas Pett, a great shipbuilder for the Navy in King Charles the Second’s time.  I believe, too, he had a son christened after him, who became a commissioner of the Navy.”

“You don’t say so!  The mere accident of a letter . . . but it proves the accuracy of our childish instincts.  A commissionership—­whatever the duties it may carry—­would be the very thing, or a storekeepership, with a number of ledgers:  it being understood that shipping formed my background, in what I believe is nautically termed the offing.  I know not what exact distance constitutes an offing.  My imagination ever placed it within sight and sufficiently near the scene of my occupation to pervade it with an odour of hemp and tar.”

He paused again, glanced up at my father, and—­on a nod of encouragement—­continued—­

“The nuisance is, I was born in the Midlands—­to be precise, at West Bromicheham—­the son of a well-to-do manufacturer of artificial jewellery.  The only whiff of the brine that ever penetrated my father’s office came wafted through an off-channel of his trade.  He did an intermittent business in the gilding of small idols, to be shipped overseas and traded as objects of worship among the negroes of the American plantations.  Jewellery, however, was his stand-by.  In the manufacture of meretricious ware he had a plausibility amounting to genius, in the disposing of it a talent for hard bargains; and the two together had landed him in affluence.  Well, sir, being headed off my boyhood’s dream by the geographical inconvenience of Warwickshire—­for a lad may run away to be a sailor, sir, but the devil take me if ever I heard of one running off to be a supercargo, and even this lay a bit beyond my ambition—­I recoiled upon a passion to enter my father’s business and increase the already tidy patrimonial pile.

“But here comes in the cross of my destiny.  My father, sir, had secretly cherished dreams of raising me above his own station.  To him a gentleman—­and he ridiculously hoped to make me one—­was a fellow above working for his living.  He scoffed at my enthusiasm for trade, and at length he sent for me and in tones that brooked no denial commanded me to learn the violin.

“Never shall I forget the chill of heart with which I received that fatal mandate.  I have no ear for music, sir.  In tenderer years indeed I had made essay upon the Jew’s harp, but had relinquished it without a sigh.

“‘The violin!’ I cried, though the words choked me.  ’Father, anything but that!  If it were the violoncello, now—­’

“But he cut me short in cold incisive accents.  ’The violin, or you are no son of mine.’

“I fled from the house, my home no longer.  On the way to the front door I had sufficient presence of mind, and no more, to make a detour to the larder and possess myself of the longest joint; which my heated judgment, confusing temporal with linear measurement, commended to me as the most lasting.  It proved to be a shin of beef:  unnutritious except for soup (and I carried no tureen), useless as an object of barter.  With this and two half-crowns in my pocket I slammed the front-door behind me and faced the future.”