so, upon the whole, they got on
very well together.

Now on this day, when the lieutenant had exhausted a grumble of unusual
intensity, and the fair Geraldine (his eldest child) had obeyed him to
the letter, by keeping her mouth full while she warmed a plate for him,
it was not long before his usual luck befell the bold Carroway. Rap,
rap, came a knock at the side door of his cottage--a knock only too
familiar; and he heard the gruff voice of Cadman--"Can I see his honor
immediately?"

"No, you can not," replied Mrs. Carroway. "One would think you were all
in a league to starve him. No sooner does he get half a mouthful--"

"Geraldine, put it on the hob, my dear, and a basin over it. Matilda, my
love, you know my maxim--'Duty first, dinner afterward.' Cadman, I will
come with you."

The revenue officer took up his hat (which had less time now than his
dinner to get cold) and followed Cadman to the usual place for holding
privy councils. This was under the heel of the pier (which was then
about half as long as now) at a spot where the outer wall combed over,
to break the crest of the surges in the height of a heavy eastern gale.
At neap tides, and in moderate weather, this place was dry, with a fine
salt smell; and with nothing in front of it but the sea, and nothing
behind it but solid stone wall, any one would think that here must be
commune sacred, secret, and secluded from eavesdroppers. And yet it was
not so, by reason of a very simple reason.

Upon the roadway of the pier, and over against a mooring-post, where the
parapet and the pier itself made a needful turn toward the south, there
was an equally needful thing, a gully-hole with an iron trap to carry
off the rain that fell, or the spray that broke upon the fabric; and the
outlet of this gully was in the face of the masonry outside. Carroway,
not being gifted with a crooked mind, had never dreamed that this little
gut might conduct the pulses of the air, like the Tyrant's Ear, and
that the trap at the end might be a trap for him. Yet so it was; and by
gently raising the movable iron frame at the top, a well-disposed person
might hear every word that was spoken in the snug recess below. Cadman
was well aware of this little fact, but left his commander to find it
out.

The officer, always thinly clad (both through the state of his wardrobe
and his dread of effeminate comfort), settled his bony shoulders
against the rough stonework, and his heels upon a gro