"The rich ports of history are the most frequent stopping-places of his mind," proceeded Dr. King. "Even as a schoolboy this was so. While other lads took delight in the doings of the military heroes of antiquity, Charles took to sea in the galleys of the Phenician merchants, searching out new lands, new peoples, new trade. While the others thrilled with the story of Thermopylæ, his gaze was fixed upon Tyre, with its great docks, its famed factories of purple, its crowding ships. His companions listened with pleasure to the voice of Cato pronouncing the doom of Carthage in the Roman senate; but Charles saw only the passing of a wondrous people, who had carried commerce to a point never previously touched in history. Venice he looked upon with almost idolatry; here the manufacturer, the merchant, the trader had lifted themselves to the places of kings; the hardy enterprise of the Genoese seafarers gained his unbounded admiration, and he never tired talking of them. But Prince Henry of Portugal was his hero; from amid the batterings of a war that had gone on for many generations, he saw this mind arise and fill with its dream of the rich regions beyond Sahara. While other boys of his age were hurry-skurrying through some rough, healthful sport, Charles, with his lame foot, would sit silent; in his mind he would enter the lonely tower at Cape St. Vincent, as the prince had so often done; and while the gray sea threw itself against the desolate headland he'd brood upon its avenues and the possibility of traversing them to India, the land of his desire." "Well," said Anthony, as he fired the tobacco in his pipe at one of the candles. "I now see the foundation of some of the things I've heard said of him." "These dreams of his," said Dr. King, "he has carried with him through life. He does not plot nor contrive in his business; things rush upon him like inspirations. His ships are the stanchest, the fleetest, and have the greatest capacity of any in the port; his suggestions to the builders made them so, though many a head was shaken over them before the sea and the wind proved his word. These same ships have sailed on many a voyage which crafty mariners looked upon as folly; but Charles Stevens has a way of turning bad into good, and causing avoided places to teem with riches." "I find myself with a great desire to meet my uncle," said Anthony, with a smile. "Christopher Dent says you are upon intimate terms with him, and yet you talk of his doings as though he were a hero of legend. It is only a very remarkable man who can inspire a thing like that." The physician looked at the young man through the haze of curling tobacco smoke that drifted between them; and there was a shadow upon his face. "What I have told you," said he, "are the facts as a good many know them. But, if necessary, I could speak of other things of which only little is known, and that to a very few."