till late in November. Here the child
lived alone with his mother. For there was a vagueness of popular
opinion respecting Kit's father; while about his mother, unhappily,
there was no vagueness at all. She was a handsome, low-browed woman,
with a loud laugh, a defiant manner, and a dress of violent hues.
Decent wives clutched their skirts in passing her: but, as a set-off,
she was on excellent terms with every sea-captain and mate that put
into the port.

All these captains and mates knew Kit and made a pet of him: and
indeed there was a curious charm in the great serious eyes and
reddish curls of this child whom other children shunned. No one can
tell if he felt his isolation; but of course it drove him to return
the men's friendship, and to wear a man's solemnity and habit of
speech. The woman dressed him carefully, in glaring colours, out of
her means: and as for his manners, they would no doubt have become
false and absurd, as time went and knowledge came; but at the age of
four they were those of a prince.

"My father was a ship's captain, too," he would tell a new
acquaintance, "but he was drowned at sea--oh, a long while ago; years
and years before I was born."

The beginning of this speech he had learned from his mother; and the
misty antiquity of the loss his own childish imagination suggested.
The captains, hearing it, would wink at each other, swallow down
their grins, and gravely inform him of the sights he would see and
the lands he would visit when the time came for him, too, to be a
ship's captain. Often and often I have seen him perched, with his
small legs dangling, on one of the green posts on the quay, and
drinking in their talk of green icebergs, and flaming parrots, and
pig-tailed Chinamen; of coral reefs of all marvellous colours, and
suns that burnt men black, and monkeys that hung by their tails to
the branches and pelted the passers-by with coco-nuts; and the rest
of it. And the child would go back to the cottage in a waking dream,
treading bright clouds of fancy, with perhaps a little carved box or
knick-knack in his hand, the gift of some bearded, tender-hearted
ruffian. It was pitiful.

Of course he picked up their talk, and very soon could swear with
equal and appalling freedom in English, French, Swedish, German, and
Italian. But the words were words to him and no more, as he had no
morals. Nice distinctions between good and evil never entered the
little room where he slept