Here an old uncle of Frederick, who had been dead more than fifteen years, came toward him comfortably puffing at a pipe.  He had just arisen, it seemed, from a bench by the open entrance to his house.

“How do you do?” he said.  “We are all here, my boy.”  Frederick knew whom the old man meant when he said, “We are all here.”  “We fare very well,” the old man, who in his lifetime had not been exactly favoured by fortune, continued, grinning.  “I didn’t get along so well when I was up with you in the dismal air.  In the first place, my boy, we have the legno santo.”  With his pipe he pointed to the dark interior of his house, where blue tongues of flame were leaping on the hearth.  “And besides, we have the Toilers of the Light.  But I am detaining you. We have time, but you must hurry.”  Frederick said good-bye.  “Fiddlesticks!” exclaimed his uncle.  “Do you people down there still keep up that tiresome business of ‘how-do-you-do’ and ’good-bye’?”

Climbing higher up the street, Peter Schmidt led Frederick through a number of houses and inside courtyards.  In one of the courtyards with many corners, reminding Frederick of certain ancient sections of Hamburg and Nuremberg, was a ship-chandlery bearing the sign, “The Seagoing Ship.”

“Everything here looks quite ordinary,” said Peter Schmidt, “but here we have all the ancient models.”  He pointed to the small model of an ancient vessel standing in the little window of the chandlery, among packages of chewing tobacco and leather whips.

Ships, ships, nothing but ships!  The sight of this last vessel seemed to produce the beginning of a slight gnawing resistance in Frederick’s brain.  He knew he was looking upon an all-embracing symbol, which he had never before seen.  With a new sense organ, with centralised clarity of thought, he realised that here, in this little model, was comprehended all the wandering and adventuring of the human soul.

“Oh,” said the chandler, opening the glass door of the little shop, at which all sorts of wares hanging on the door swung to and fro with a clatter, “Oh, you here, Frederick?  I thought you were still at sea.”

Frederick recognised the chandler as George Rasmussen, whose farewell letter he had received in Southampton.  He was dressed in a shabby cap and dressing-gown belonging to a confectioner long dead, whom he had known when a boy.  Mysterious as it all was, there was yet something natural in this meeting with his friend.  The little shop was alive with goldfinches.  “They are the goldfinches,” Rasmussen explained, “that settled in the Heuscheuer Mountains last winter, you know, and were fatal to me.”

“Yes, I remember,” said Frederick.  “We would approach a bare branch or tree, and suddenly it would seem to shake itself and scatter thousands of gold leaves.  We interpreted it as auguring mountains of money.”