e's seen it,' he said; 'yes, look there! One! Two! Three!
'Four!'

My own eyes glowed and my heart hopped up and down. Yonder was a
verity of England once more after years of absence. People came
along to our corner of the deck and questioned and stared and
laughed to one another. 'But I want to hear the end of that
story,' I said, and I enticed him away with me past the wheel-house
to a place far out of the talk and the tramping up and down.
'How used the people to come back, did you say?' I asked him.
'Oh! some had done fairly well,' he said, 'and some were
broken, but it was good to see how slow they found the boat go,
getting back again, and how they hung on the lights.' 'Yet they
didn't stay long in England some of them?' I hazarded. 'No,' he
said; 'I'd see some coming back, and hear of lots more. The same
thing over again it would seem when we came into Table Bay, only
they were a bit older.' 'But some didn't come home to England,
did they?' I wanted him to tell me. 'No,' he said; 'you're right
there no doubt. This friend of mine named Holmes took a long time
coming. But I heard from him sometimes when he was up country. He
found the business of settling Canaan rough, I gathered. I think
I'm glad I heard about it from a distance. It mightn't have
suited me.' 'And he got married up there, did you say?' 'Yes, his
girl came out on this ship when he'd been out seven years or so.
He used to write to me sometimes, and he arranged about the boat
she came by. She was full of the farm she was going to; he had
written about it. She seemed to think that it was a regular
Kentish homestead. She wrote afterwards and thanked me for
looking after her on the voyage, and said she had found two huts
on a kopje when she got there. All their cattle died when her boy
was about six years old. Then she died. Holmes had a lot of
trouble that year. So he sold up and came on board the year
after. Waited for my boat, worse luck, and contracted enteric in
Cape Town. I thought we should lose him off Cape Verde. But it
wasn't a clammy night the night we passed the wind blew fresh and
we got him by. How he longed for home, for settling down in Kent.
Rhodesia was all very well when one was young, he had said. She
hadn't treated him so very well, but she had taught him to value
things at home. I thought we might land him home after all, when
we were a whole day or so past Cape Verde. But that night a
change came and he was gone. We dropped him