“My father was a ship’s captain, too,” he would tell a new acquaintance, “but he was drowned at sea—­oh, a long while ago; years and years before I was born.”

The beginning of this speech he had learned from his mother; and the misty antiquity of the loss his own childish imagination suggested.  The captains, hearing it, would wink at each other, swallow down their grins, and gravely inform him of the sights he would see and the lands he would visit when the time came for him, too, to be a ship’s captain.  Often and often I have seen him perched, with his small legs dangling, on one of the green posts on the quay, and drinking in their talk of green icebergs, and flaming parrots, and pig-tailed Chinamen; of coral reefs of all marvellous colours, and suns that burnt men black, and monkeys that hung by their tails to the branches and pelted the passers-by with coco-nuts; and the rest of it.  And the child would go back to the cottage in a waking dream, treading bright clouds of fancy, with perhaps a little carved box or knick-knack in his hand, the gift of some bearded, tender-hearted ruffian.  It was pitiful.

Of course he picked up their talk, and very soon could swear with equal and appalling freedom in English, French, Swedish, German, and Italian.  But the words were words to him and more, as he had no morals.  Nice distinctions between good and evil never entered the little room where he slept to the sound only of the waves that curved round Battery Point and tumbled on the beach below.  And I know that, one summer evening, when the scandalised townsmen and their wedded wives assembled, and marched down to the cottage with intent to lead the woman in a “Ramriding,” the sight of Kit playing in the garden, and his look of innocent delight as he ran in to call his mother out, took the courage out of them and sent them home, up the hill, like sheep.

Of course the truth must have come to him soon.  But it never did:  for when he was just five, the woman took a chill and died in a week.  She had left a little money; and the Vicar, rather than let Kit go to the workhouse, spent it to buy the child admission to an Orphanage in the Midlands, a hundred miles away.

So Kit hung the rose-tree with little scraps of crape, and was put, dazed and white, into a train and whisked a hundred miles off.  And everybody forgot him.

Kit spent two years at the Orphanage in an antique, preposterous suit—­snuff-coloured coat with lappels, canary waistcoat, and corduroy small-clothes.  And they gave him his meals regularly.  There were ninety-nine other boys who all throve on the food:  but Kit pined.  And the ninety-nine, being full of food, made a racket at times; but Kit found it quiet—­deathly quiet; and his eyes wore a listening look.

For the truth was, he missed the noise of the beach, and was listening for it.  And deep down in his small heart the sea was piping and calling to him.  And the world had grown dumb; and he yearned always:  until they had to get him a new canary waistcoat, for the old one had grown too big.