high, because Mrs. MacWhirr (a pretentious person with a scraggy
neck and a disdainful manner) was admittedly ladylike, and in the
neighbourhood considered as "quite superior." The only secret of her
life was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come home
to stay for good. Under the same roof there dwelt also a daughter called
Lydia and a son, Tom. These two were but slightly acquainted with their
father. Mainly, they knew him as a rare but privileged visitor, who of
an evening smoked his pipe in the dining-room and slept in the house.
The lanky girl, upon the whole, was rather ashamed of him; the boy
was frankly and utterly indifferent in a straightforward, delightful,
unaffected way manly boys have.

And Captain MacWhirr wrote home from the coast of China twelve times
every year, desiring quaintly to be "remembered to the children," and
subscribing himself "your loving husband," as calmly as if the words so
long used by so many men were, apart from their shape, worn-out things,
and of a faded meaning.

The China seas north and south are narrow seas. They are seas full of
every-day, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand-banks, reefs, swift and
changeable currents--tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a seaman
in clear and definite language. Their speech appealed to Captain
MacWhirr's sense of realities so forcibly that he had given up his
state-room below and practically lived all his days on the bridge of
his ship, often having his meals sent up, and sleeping at night in the
chart-room. And he indited there his home letters. Each of them, without
exception, contained the phrase, "The weather has been very fine this
trip," or some other form of a statement to that effect. And this
statement, too, in its wonderful persistence, was of the same perfect
accuracy as all the others they contained.