et-handkerchiefs. He said that though the parrots stole the
captain's handkerchiefs, they were all very much attached to him; but
they quarrelled among themselves, and swore at each other in seven
dialects of the West Coast of Africa.

Mrs. Johnson herself once showed me a little print of Dartmouth
harbour, and told me it was supposed that in old times an iron chain
was stretched from rock to rock across its mouth as a means of
defence. And that afternoon Fred told me a splendid story about the
chain, and how it was made of silver, and that each link was worth
twenty pounds, and how at the end where it was fastened with a padlock
every night at sunset, to keep out the French, a lion sat on the ledge
of rock at the harbour's mouth, with the key tied round his neck by a
sea-green ribbon. He had to have a new ribbon on the first Sunday in
every month, Fred said, because his mane dirtied them so fast. A story
which Fred had of his grandfather's single-handed encounter with this
lion on one occasion, when the gallant captain would let a brig in
distress into the harbour after sunset, and the lion would not let him
have the key, raised my opinion of his courage and his humanity to
the highest point. But what he did at home was nothing to the exploits
which Fred recounted of him in foreign lands.

I fancy Fred must have read some real accounts of South America, the
tropical forests, the wonderful birds and flowers, and the ruins of
those buried cities which have no history; and that on these real
marvels he built up his own romances of the Great Stone City, where
the captain encountered an awful race of giants with no legs, who
carved stones into ornaments with clasp-knives, as the Swiss cut out
pretty things in wood, and cracked the cocoa-nuts with their fingers.
I am sure he invented flowers as he went along when he was telling me
about the forests. He used to look round the garden (which would have
satisfied any one who had not seen or heard of what the captain had
come across) and say in his slow way, "The blue chalice flower was
about the shape of that magnolia, only twice as big, and just the
colour of the gentians in the border, and it had a great white tassel
hanging out like the cactus in the parlour window, and all the leaves
were yellow underneath; and it smelt like rosemary."

If the captain's experiences in other countries outshone what had
befallen him in his native land, both these paled before the wonders
he