d he found it full of music from
end to end, every street humming with song."

"Oh, lad, I have been there," said the seaman, unabashed, his teeth very
white in the brown of his smiling face. "You sail and sail in winds and
drift in calms, and there is a place called Erin's Eye and a mountain
rock behind it, and then you come upon the town of the king's daughter.
It is a town reeling with music; some people without the ears would miss
it, you and Black Duncan would be jigging to the sound of it. The world,
'_ille_ (and here's the sailorman who has sailed the seven seas and
knows its worst and best), is a very grand place to such as understand
and allow. I was born with a caul as we say; I know that I'll never
drown, so that when winds crack I feel safe in the most staggering ship.
I have gone into foreign ports in the dead of night, our hail for light
but answered by Sir Echo, and we would be waiting for light, with the
smell of flowers and trees about us, and--"

"That would be worth sailing for," said Gilian, looking hard at the
embers in the Carron stove.

"Or the beast of the wood might come roaring and bellowing to the
shore."

"That would be very frightsome," said Gilian with a shiver. "I have made
believe the hum of the bee in the heather at my ear as I lay on it in
the summer was the roar of the wild beast a long way off; it was uncanny
and I could make myself afraid of it, but when I liked it was the bee
again and the heather was no higher than my knee."

The seaman laughed till the den rang. He poked the fire and the flame
thrust out and made the boy and the man and the timbers and bunks dance
and shake in the world between light and shadow. "You are the sharpest
boy ever I conversed with," said he.

A run of the merriest, the sweetest, the most unconstrained laughter
broke overhead like a bird's song. They looked up and found the square
of blue sky broken at the hatch by a girl's head. A roguish face in
a toss of brown hair, seen thus above them against the sky, seemed to
Gilian the face of one of the fairies with which he had peopled the
seaman's isle.

"There you go!" cried Black Duncan, noway astonished. "Did I not tell
you never to come on board without halloo?"

"I cried," said the girl in a most pretty English that sounded all
the sweeter beside the seaman's broken and harsh accent in a language
foreign to him. "I cried 'O Duncan' twice and you never heard, so I knew
you were asleep in your di