As I now entered, Mrs. Coombes rose from a high-backed settle near the
fire, and bade me good-morning with a courtesy.

"What a lovely day it is, Mrs. Coombes! It is so bright over the sea,"
I said, going to the one little window which looked out on the great
Atlantic, "that one almost expects a great merchant navy to come sailing
into Kilkhaven--sunk to the water's edge with silks, and ivory, and spices,
and apes, and peacocks, like the ships of Solomon that we read about--just
as the sun gets up to the noonstead."

Before I record her answer, I turn to my reader, who in the spirit
accompanies me, and have a little talk with him. I always make it a rule to
speak freely with the less as with the more educated of my friends. I never
_talk down_ to them, except I be expressly explaining something to them.
The law of the world is as the law of the family. Those children grow much
the faster who hear all that is going on in the house. Reaching ever above
themselves, they arrive at an understanding at fifteen, which, in the usual
way of things, they would not reach before five-and-twenty or thirty; and
this in a natural way, and without any necessary priggishness, except such
as may belong to their parents. Therefore I always spoke to the poor and
uneducated as to my own people,--freely, not much caring whether I should
be quite understood or not; for I believed in influences not to be measured
by the measure of the understanding.

But what was the old woman's answer? It was this:

"I know, sir. And when I was as young as you"--I was not so very young,
my reader may well think--"I thought like that about the sea myself.
Everything come from the sea. For my boy Willie he du bring me home the