But he did not speak hopefully. The worst of growing up is that you seem to want more and more to have a bit of the real thing in your games. Oswald could not now be content to play at bandits and just capture Albert next door, as once, in happier days, he was pleased and proud to do. It was not a coastguard that told us about the smugglers. It was a very old man that we met two or three miles along the beach. He was leaning against a boat that was wrong way up on the shingle, and smoking the strongest tobacco Oswald's young nose has ever met. I think it must have been Black Jack. We said, "How do you do?" and Alice said, "Do you mind if we sit down near you?" "Not me," replied the aged seafarer. We could see directly that he was this by his jersey and his sea-boots. The girls sat down on the beach, but we boys leaned against the boat like the seafaring one. We hoped he would join in conversation, but at first he seemed too proud. And there was something dignified about him, bearded and like a Viking, that made it hard for us to begin. At last he took his pipe out of his mouth and said-- "Here's a precious Quakers' meeting! You didn't set down here just for to look at me?" "I'm sure you look very nice," Dora said. "Same to you, miss, I'm sure," was the polite reply. "We want to talk to you awfully," said Alice, "if you don't mind?" "Talk away," said he. And then, as so often happens, no one could think of anything to say. Suddenly Noel said, "_I_ think you look nice too, but I think you look as though you had a secret history. Have you?" "Not me," replied the Viking-looking stranger. "I ain't got no history, nor jog-graphy neither. They didn't give us that much schooling when I was a lad." "Oh!" replied Noel; "but what I really meant was, were you ever a pirate or anything?" "Never in all my born," replied the stranger, now thoroughly roused; "I'd scorn the haction. I was in the navy, I was, till I lost the sight of my eye, looking too close at gunpowder. Pirates is snakes, and they ought to be killed as such." We felt rather sorry, for though of course it is very wrong to be a pirate, it is very interesting too. Things are often like this. That is one of the reasons why it is so hard to be truly good. Dora was the only one who was pleased. She said-- "Yes, pirates _are_ very wrong. And so are highwaymen and smugglers." "I don't know about highwaymen," the old man replied; "they went out afore my time, worse luck; but my father's great-uncle by the mother's side, he see one hanged once. A fine upstanding fellow he was, and made a speech while they was a-fitting of the rope. All the women was snivelling and sniffing and throwing bokays at him." "Did any of the bouquets reach him?" asked the interested Alice.