en busy indeed. I sought with all my might to master
a business for which I had but little taste, and my grandfather
complimented me, before the season was done, upon my management. I
was wont to ride that summer at four of a morning to canter beside
Mr. Starkie afield, and I came to know the yield of every patch to a
hogshead and the pound price to a farthing. I grew to understand as well
as another the methods of curing the leaf. And the wheat pest appearing
that year, I had the good fortune to discover some of the clusters in
the sheaves, and ground our oyster-shells in time to save the crop. Many
a long evening I spent on the wharves with old Stanwix, now toothless
and living on his pension, with my eye on the glow of his pipe and my
ear bent to his stories of the sea. It was his fancy that the gift of
prophecy had come to him with the years; and at times, when his look
would wander to the black rigging in the twilight, he would speak
strangely enough.

"Faith, Mr. Richard," he would say; "tho' your father was a soldier
afore ye, ye were born to the deck of a ship-o'-war. Mark an old man's
words, sir."

"Can you see the frigate, Stanwix?" I laughed once, when he had repeated
this with more than common solemnity.

His reply rose above the singing of the locusts.

"Ay, sir, that I can. But she's no frigate, sir. Devil knows what she
is. She looks like a big merchantman to me, such as I've seed in the
Injy trade, with a high poop in the old style. And her piercin's be not
like a frigate." He said this with a readiness to startle me, and little
enough superstition I had. A light was on his seared face, and his pipe
lay neglected on the boards. "Ay, sir, and there be a flag astern of her
never yet seed on earth, nor on the waters under the earth. The tide is
settin' in, the tide is settin' in."

These were words to set me thinking. And many a time they came back to
me when the old man was laid away in the spot reserved for those who
sailed the seas for Mr. Carvel.

Every week I drew up a report for my grandfather, and thus I strove by
shouldering labour and responsibility to ease my conscience of that load
which troubled it. For often, as we walked together through the yellow
fields of an evening, it had been on my tongue to confess the lie Mr.
Allen had led me into. But the sight of the old man, trembling and
tremulous, aged by a single stroke, his childlike trust in my strength
and beliefs, and above all his fai