With his attention concentrated and severe even in so small an effort as taking from his broad back a reluctant coat, and the unvarying fixed intentness of the dark eyes over which the lids, loose with age, had partly folded, giving him the piercing look of a bird of prey; and the swarthiness of his face, massive, hairless, and acutely ridged, with its crown of tousled white hair, his was a figure which made it easy to believe the tales one had heard of him when he was the master of the _Oberon_, and drove his ship home with the new season's tea, leaving, it is said, a trail of light spars all the way from Tientsin to the Channel. The coat was off. His wife had it over her arm, and was regarding with concern the big petulant face above her. She said to him: "Number Ten is let at last. They're a young couple who have got it. He's a sailor." The old man sat down at a corner of the table, stooped, and in one handful abruptly hauled the cat off the rug, laying its unresisting body across his knees, and rubbing its ribs with a hand that half covered it. He did not appear to have heard what he had been told. He did not look at her, but talked gravely to the fire. "I met Dennison today," he said, as if speaking aloud to himself, in surprise at meeting Dennison. "Years since I saw him," he continued, turning to me. "Where was it now, where was it? Must have been Canton River, the year he lost his ship. Extraordinary to find Dennison still afloat. Not many of those men about now. You can go the length of the Dock Road today and see nothing and meet nobody." He looked again into the flames, fixedly, as though what he really wanted was only to be found in them. His wife was at his elbow. She, too, was watching them, still with his coat over her arm. She spoke aloud, though more to herself than to us. "She seemed such a nice little woman, too. I couldn't see the badge on his cap." "Eh?" said the old man, throwing the cat back to the floor and rounding to his wife. "What's that? Let's have tea, Mrs. Williams. We're both dreaming, and there's a visitor. What are you dreaming about? You've nothing to dream about." There was never any doubt, though, that the past was full and alive to him. There was only the past. And what a memory was his! He would look at the portrait of his old clipper, the _Oberon_--it was central over the mantel-shelf--and recall her voyages, and the days in each voyage, and just how the weather was, what canvas she carried, and how things happened. Malabar Street vanished. We would go, when he was in that mood, and live for the evening in another year, with men who have gone, among strange affairs forgotten.