"Sixty-seven,--a man can see and do a good deal in that time,"
I said, not flattering myself on the originality of the remark,
but desiring to set him talking. In the country, as elsewhere,
we must forego profundity if we wish to be understood.

"Yes, sir," he said, "I have been about a good deal in my
time. I have seen pretty well all of the world there is to see,
and sailed as far as ship could take me."

"Indeed, you have been a sailor too?"

"Twenty-two thousand miles of sea," he continued, without
directly answering my remark. "Yes, Vancouver's about as far
as any vessel need want to go; and then I have caught seals off
the coast of Labrador, and walked my way through the raspberry
plains at the back of the White Mountains."

"Vancouver," "Labrador," "The White Mountains," the very
names, thus casually mentioned on a Surrey heath, seemed full of
the sounding sea. Like talismans they whisked one away to
strange lands, across vast distances of space imagination refused
to span. Strange to think that the shabby little man at my side
had them all fast locked, pictures upon pictures, in his brain,
and as we were talking was back again in goodness knows what
remote latitude.

I kept looking at him and saying, "Twenty-two thousand miles of
sea! sixty-seven! and builds his own cottage!"

In addition to all this he had found time to be twenty-one years