“‘It was but last night,’ he continued, in a tone of melancholy widely at variance with the usual sound of his voice, ‘that I dreamed of the old man—his thin, white hairs brushed back from his brow—his spectacles set straight on his nose, as he traced out on the revolving globe the voyages of Columbus and Vasco de Gama, pausing, with his rod stayed at some particular point, to enlarge on the daring spirit of each. It was little wonder that I early yearned for the sea; and yet, as I afterward learned, great was his astonishment, not unmixed with chagrin akin to remorse, when he found that I had cut and run. However,’ he said, putting his hand to his forehead, ‘we met again, and the matter was thoroughly cleared up between us.’ “Here he paused in thought, his eyes fixed in a troubled way on my face, while the changes wrought by time and the sea seemed to disappear from his own, and I wondered that I ever could have been so blind as not to have known him at once: a triple sense of condemnation oppressed me; and the soft eyes and the sweet face came vividly up, until I actually shuddered to think, as the whole name, Ellen Symington Blount, was as plain as day; what terrible tale which linked her fate with his might be still lurking behind. I could well understand, too, his allusion to Lallah Rookh, which was her favorite poem, and how it was that he had no recollection of me, having never seen me but once, and that for a moment by starlight. Old Charley’s riddle was read, though it was hard to tell how he became master of it, and stifling my feelings as I best could, I awaited in silence for the captain to resume. “His eyes dropped to the floor, where the rats were again creeping about unheeded: presently they scampered off, and I heard the hasty _pit-pat_ of naked feet as one of the anchor-watch came aft to the binnacle, when the ship’s bell struck one. The stroke was instantly followed by a clang from the Arab frigate, and then by a sort of stir, which loomed up as it were on the sultry gloom of night, in the midst of which you seemed to hear the cries of the sentries on shore, calling from tower to tower, through the pestilential air; and when these died away, with the nearer echoes of the bells in the harbor, you heard again the sound of the man’s feet pattering along the deck, as if he, too, had paused to listen before rejoining his watch-mate, who perhaps, like myself, was spinning some old yarn. “When all was still again, the silence seemed to press on my ears like the distant splurge of a tide, while the lamp drowsed and the rats crept to Catherton’s very feet, scuttling off, however, as soon as he stirred, breaking abruptly out of his reverie. “‘I made a trading voyage round the globe, and returning to the village twenty-six months after I left it, was received like one from the dead. I was bent upon giving old Blount, the schoolmaster, a surprise—as much so, it seems to me now, as if I had run away from school for that sole end.