had told him a thing he found he remembered it--not as one remembers a
tale that is told, but as one remembers a real thing that has happened.

And days went on, and he became surer and surer that he was really this
other Richard, and that he had only dreamed all that old life in New
Cross with his aunt and in the pleasant country roads with Mr. Beale.
And he wondered how he could ever have dreamed such things.

Quite soon came the day when the nurse dressed him in clothes strange,
but strangely comfortable and fine, and carried him to the window, from
which, as he sat in a big oak chair, he could see the green fields that
sloped down to the river, and the rigging and the masts of the ships
that went up and down. The rigging looked familiar, but the shape of the
ships was quite different. They were shorter and broader than the ships
that Dickie Harding had been used to see, and they, most of them, rose
up much higher out of the water.

"I should like to go and look at them closer," he told the nurse.

"Once thou'rt healed," she said, "thou'lt be forever running down to the
dockyard. Thy old way--I know thee, hearing the master mariners' tales,
and setting thy purpose for a galleon of thine own and the golden South
Americas."

"What's a galleon?" said Dickie. And was told. The nurse was very
patient with his forgettings.

He was very happy. There seemed somehow to be more room in this new life
than in the old one, and more time. No one was in a hurry, and there was
not another house within a quarter of a mile. All green fields. Also he
was a person of consequence. The servants called him "Master Richard,"
and he felt, as he heard them, that being called Master Richard meant
not only that the servants respected him as their master's son, but
that he was somebody from whom great things were expected. That he had
duties of kindness and protection to the servants; that he was expected
to grow up brave and noble and generous and unselfish, to care for those
who called him master. He felt now very fully, what he had felt vaguely
and dimly at Talbot Court, that he was not the sort of person who ought
to do anything mean and dishonorable, such as being a burglar, and
climbing in at pantry windows; that when he grew up he would be expected
to look after his servants and laborers, and all the men and women whom
he would have under him--that their happiness and well-being would be
his charge. And the thought swelled his heart,