nd avoid its ink. . . . In return the boy gave him his heart,
and even something like worship.

One fine day, as they tacked to and fro a mile and more from the
harbour's mouth, whiffing for mackerel, the boy looked up from his seat
by the tiller. "I say, Billy, did you speak?"

Billy, seated on the thwart and leaning with both arms on the weather
gunwale, turned his head lazily. "Not a word this half-hour," he
answered.

"Well now, I thought not; but somebody, or something--spoke just now."
The boy blushed, for Billy was looking at him quizzically. "It's not
the first time I've heard it, either," he went on; "sometimes it sounds
right astern, and sometimes close beside me."

"What does it say?" asked Billy, re-lighting his pipe.

"I don't know that it _says_ anything, and yet it seems to speak out
quite clearly. Five or six times I've heard it, and usually on smooth
days like this, when the wind's steady."

Billy nodded. "That's right, sonny; I've heard it scores of times.
And they say. . . . But, there, I don't believe a word of it."

"What do they say?"

"They say that 'tis the voice of drowned men down below, and that they
hail their names whenever a boat passes."

The boy stared at the water. He knew it for a floor through which he
let down his trammels and crab-pots into wonderland--a twilight with
forests and meadows of its own, in which all the marvels of all the
fairy-books were possible; but the terror of it had never clouded his
delight.

"Nonsense, Billy; the voice I hear is always quite cheerful and
friendly--not a bit like a dead man's."

"I tell what I'm told," answered Billy, and the subject dropped.

But the boy did not cease thinking about the voice; and some time after
he came, as it seemed, upon a clue. His father had set him to read
Shakespeare; and, taking down the first of twelve volumes from the
shelf, he began upon the first play, _The Tempest_. He was prepared to
yawn, but the first scene flung open a door to him, and he stepped into
a new world, a childish Ferdinand roaming an Isle of Voices.
He resigned Miranda to the grown-up prince, for whom (as he saw at a
glance, being wise in the ways of story-books) she was eminently fitted.
It was in Ariel, perched with harp upon the shrouds of the king's ship,
that he recognised the unseen familiar of his own voyaging. "O spirit,
be my friend--speak to me often!" As children will, he gave Prospero's
island a local habitation i