“Well, I don’t mind,” said Mr. Rowe, removing his hat, and mopping himself with his very useful pocket-handkerchief.  “Jem, there’s a bit of grass there, let her have a mouthful.”

“I thought you’d like this,” he continued; “there ain’t a prettier bit between here and Pyebridge.”

It was so lovely, that the same idea seized both Fred and me:  Why not settle here, at least for a time?  It was an uninhabited island, only waiting to be claimed by some adventurous navigator, and obviously fertile.  The prospect of blackberries on the mainland was particularly fine, and how they would ripen in this blazing sun!  Birds sang in the trees above; fish leaping after flies broke the still surface of the water with a musical splash below; and beyond a doubt there must be the largest and the sweetest of earth-nuts on the island, easy to get out of the deep beds of untouched leaf-mould.  And when Mr. Rowe cried “Look!” and we saw a water-fowl scud across the lake, leaving a sharp trail like a line of light behind her, we felt that we might spend all our savings in getting to the Pacific Ocean, and not find when we got there a place which offered more natural resources to the desert islander.

If the barge-master would have gone ashore on the mainland out of the way, and if we could have got ashore on the island without help, we should not have confided our plans to so doubtful a friend.  As it was, we were obliged to tell Mr. Rowe that we proposed to found a settlement in Linnet Lake, and he was completely opposed to the idea.

It was only when he said (with that air of reserved and funded knowledge which gave such unfathomable depth to his irony, and made his sayings so oracular)—­“There’s very different places in the world to Linnet Flash”—­that we began to be ashamed of our hasty enthusiasm, and to think that it would be a pity to stop so short in our adventurous career.

So we decided to go on; but the masterly way in which Mr. Rowe spoke of the world made me think he must have seen a good deal of it, and when we had looked our last upon the island, and had crept with lowered mast under an old brick bridge where young ferns hung down from the archway, and when we were once more travelling between flat banks and coppices that gave us no shelter, I said to the barge-master—­“Have you ever been at sea, Mr. Rowe?”

“Seven_teen_ year in the Royal Navy,” said Mr. Rowe, with a strong emphasis upon teen, as if he feared we might do him the injustice of thinking he had only served his Queen and country for seven.

For the next two hours Fred and I sat, indifferent alike to the sunshine and the shore, in rapt attention to Mr. Rowe’s narrative of his experiences at sea under the flag that has

     “Braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze.”

I believe Fred enjoyed them simply as stories, but they fanned in my heart that restless fever for which sea-breezes are the only cure.  I think Mr. Rowe got excited himself as he recalled old times.  And when he began to bawl sea-songs with a voice like an Atlantic gale, and when he vowed in cadence