The moment she saw and smelt the creek she knew she had carried it in her soul all along: the white hut with its flagged mast, the great Watch Vessel, the tumble of cottages, sheds, barrels, pecking fowls, grubbing black pigs, recumbent ladders, discoloured boats with their keels upwards, black rotting barges, and rigged smacks stranded on hard steep mud. The sea came in sluggishly through a broad green chine, half slime, half green water, spitted with gaunt encrusted poles to mark the channel. The water seemed even wider than she remembered, and yet not so wide, for it was split by an island or a promontory that gave a second sail-dotted expanse between her and the farther shore. She yearned now towards that ultimate hump of hazy woodland, and it was to remain for ever bathed in the quiet beauty which wrapped it around as Methusalem toiled up to the “Leather Bottel.” They were to stay the night there, for Daniel would have none of the Commander’s hospitality, he being still unforgiven. Besides, the child might be afraid of the corpse. It was while sitting on that sea-wall with the octogenarian that evening, her great grown-up fingers toying once again with tiny white shells that strewed its top, and pewits again trying to lead her from their young, that she first heard in broken outlines how these waters had washed her into being. Something, too, she gleaned from her refound relative-in-law, the chief mourner, whose cocked hat, tattooed arm and genial senescence—not to mention his house-boat—were one of the pleasantest impressions or re-impressions of the funeral; and whose fascinating trick of rolling one eye while the other was fixed in a glassy stare almost made the child lose the sense of what he was saying. The death of his wife had reminded the veteran of the death of Nelson—nearly forty years before—and his tremulous tones grew still shakier as he recalled how the flags over the hut and the Watch Vessel and every other flag in England had flown at half-mast, though of course there were more joyous aspects of “Trafalgar” to be celebrated in bottles of Bony’s own brandy. He frankly admitted he had himself been “three sheets in the wind”—an image of bed-linen fluttering on a clothes-line that long puzzled her. He took her abaft the Watch Vessel—it was a way of leaving Daniel Quarles alone with his dead sister—and recounted his astonishment at seeing her father’s boat spued up like Jonah out of the whale. “A handsome man,” he told her to her pleasure. But he spoilt it all by adding, “though he would talk the hind leg off a dog.” “But wasn’t that cruel?” the little girl faltered. Dap laughed. “He never did it really, dearie, and if the leg _had_ come off, he’d have helped the lame dog over a stile. And so many lingos—parleyvooing in French and swearing in Double Dutch. I don’t wonder your angel mother fell in love with him.” “My angel mother!” echoed Jinny excitedly. “Was my mother an angel?”