would have been shocked at the waste of good money had she seen them--and
launched into his sea dreams, Again I cursed all the poets of England. The
plastic mind of the bank-clerk had been overlaid, colored and distorted by
that which he had read, and the result as delivered was a confused tangle
of other voices most like the muttered song through a City telephone in
the busiest part of the day.

He talked of the galley--his own galley had he but known it--with
illustrations borrowed from the "Bride of Abydos." He pointed the
experiences of his hero with quotations from "The Corsair," and threw in
deep and desperate moral reflections from "Cain" and "Manfred," expecting
me to use them all. Only when the talk turned on Longfellow were the
jarring cross-currents dumb, and I knew that Charlie was speaking the
truth as he remembered it.

"What do you think of this?" I said one evening, as soon as I understood
the medium in which his memory worked best, and, before he could
expostulate, read him the whole of "The Saga of King Olaf!"

He listened open-mouthed, flushed, his hands drumming on the back of the
sofa where he lay, till I came to the Song of Einar Tamberskelver and the
verse:

"Einar then, the arrow taking
From the loosened string,
Answered: 'That was Norway breaking
'Neath thy hand, O King.'"

He gasped with pure delight of sound.