but with a turn for insubordination, much disposed to pursue with zeal anything save the tasks that were set him.  Inspired by Cooper and Captain Marryat, he came to the conclusion that his destiny was the Navy, and stuck so firmly to it that his father, who happened to have a friend on the Board of Admiralty, procured him a nomination, and speedily saw the boy a cadet on the “Britannia.”  Denzil wore Her Majesty’s uniform for some five years; then he tired of the service and went back to Polterham to reconsider his bent and aptitudes.

His father no longer dwelt in the old home, but had recently gone over to Norway, where he pursued his calling of timber-merchant.  Denzil’s uncle—­Samuel Quarrier—­busied in establishing a sugar-refinery in his native town, received the young man with amiable welcome, and entertained him for half a year.  The ex-seaman then resolved to join his parents abroad, as a good way of looking about him.  He found his mother on her death-bed.  In consequence of her decease, Denzil became possessed of means amply sufficient for a bachelor.  As far as ever from really knowing what he desired to be at, he began to make a show of interesting himself in timber.  Perhaps, after all, commerce was his forte.  This, then, might be called a second endeavour to establish himself.

Mr. Quarrier laughed at the idea, and would not take it seriously.  And of course was in the right, for Denzil, on pretence of studying forestry, began to ramble about Scandinavia like a gentleman at large.  Here, however, he did ultimately hit on a pursuit into which he could throw himself with decided energy.  The old Norsemen laid their spell upon him; he was bitten with a zeal for saga-hunting, studied vigorously the Northern tongues, went off to Iceland, returned to rummage in the libraries of Copenhagen, began to translate the Heimskringla, planned a History of the Vikings.  Emphatically, this kind of thing suited him.  No one was less likely to turn out a bookworm, yet in the study of Norse literature he found that combination of mental and muscular interests which was perchance what he had been seeking.

But his father was dissatisfied; a very practical man, he saw in this odd enthusiasm a mere waste of time.  Denzil’s secession from the Navy had sorely disappointed him; constantly he uttered his wish that the young man should attach himself to some vocation that became a gentleman.  Denzil, a little weary for the time of his Sea-Kings, at length consented to go to London and enter himself as a student of law.  Perhaps his father was right.  “Yes, I need discipline—­intellectual and moral.  I am beginning to perceive my defects.  There’s something in me not quite civilized.  I’ll go in for the law.”

Yet Scandinavia had not seen the last of him.  He was backwards and forwards pretty frequently across the North Sea.  He kept up a correspondence with learned Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and men of Iceland; when they came to England he entertained them with hearty hospitality, and searched with them at the British Museum.  These gentlemen liked him, though they felt occasionally that he was wont to lay down the law when the attitude of a disciple would rather have become him.