had been apprenticed hurriedly to a coasting skipper, and had remained
on the coast all his sea life. It must have been a hard one at first:
he had never taken to it; his affection turned to the land, with its
innumerable houses, with its quiet lives gathered round its firesides.
Many sailors feel and profess a rational dislike for the sea, but his
was a profound and emotional animosity--as if the love of the stabler
element had been bred into him through many generations.

"People did not know what they let their boys in for when they let them
go to sea," he expounded to Bessie. "As soon make convicts of them at
once." He did not believe you ever got used to it. The weariness of such
a life got worse as you got older. What sort of trade was it in which
more than half your time you did not put your foot inside your house?
Directly you got out to sea you had no means of knowing what went on
at home. One might have thought him weary of distant voyages; and the
longest he had ever made had lasted a fortnight, of which the most part
had been spent at anchor, sheltering from the weather. As soon as his
wife had inherited a house and enough to live on (from a bachelor uncle
who had made some money in the coal business) he threw up his command of
an East-coast collier with a feeling as though he had escaped from the
galleys. After all these years he might have counted on the fingers of
his two hands all the days he had been out of sight of England. He
had never known what it was to be out of soundings. "I have never been
further than eighty fathoms from the land," was one of his boasts.

Bessie Carvil heard all these things. In front of their cottage grew an
under-sized ash; and on summer afternoons she would bring out a chair
on the grass-plot and sit down with her sewing. Captain Hagberd, in his
canvas suit, leaned on a spade. He dug every day in his front plot. He
turned it over and over several times every year, but was not going to