mouth, so that all day long Kit could see the merchant-ships trailing
in from sea, and passing up to the little town, or dropping down to
the music of the capstan-song, and the calls and the creaking, as
their crews hauled up the sails. Some came and went under bare poles
in the wake of panting tugs; but those that carried canvas pleased
Kit more. For a narrow coombe wound up behind the cottage, and down
this coombe came not only the brook that splashed by the garden gate,
but a small breeze, always blowing, so that you might count on seeing
the white sails take it, and curve out majestically as soon as ever
they came opposite the cottage, and hold it until under the lee of
the Battery Point.

Besides these delights, the cottage had a plantation of ash and hazel
above it, that climbed straight to the smooth turf and the four guns
of the Battery; and a garden with a tamarisk hedge, and a bed of
white violets, the earliest for miles around, and a fuchsia tree
three times as tall as Kit, and a pink climbing rose that looked in
at Kit's window and blossomed till late in November. Here the child
lived alone with his mother. For there was a vagueness of popular
opinion respecting Kit's father; while about his mother, unhappily,
there was no vagueness at all. She was a handsome, low-browed woman,
with a loud laugh, a defiant manner, and a dress of violent hues.
Decent wives clutched their skirts in passing her: but, as a set-off,
she was on excellent terms with every sea-captain and mate that put
into the port.

All these captains and mates knew Kit and made a pet of him: and
indeed there was a curious charm in the great serious eyes and
reddish curls of this child whom other children shunned. No one can
tell if he felt his isolation; but of course it drove him to return