In those days I remarked a certain restlessness in my uncle. He would go to the door of an evening and look down the road for the two seamen, and if they did not appear, which was seldom, he would walk up and down, in and out of the house, with hands in pockets, melancholy whistlings issuing from his lips. He read even more closely than usual the pages of the _Vade Mecum_, and pored for hours on the maps that embellish Dr. Hawkesworth's volumes. For the most part he was silent and abstracted, but ever and anon he would startle me with some sudden exclamation, some remark or question addressed, it seemed, to himself. "Tugwell is a good man: I can trust him.... What will Susan say? ... A matter of a year or two: what's that? ... I haven't a grey hair in my head." I was somewhat concerned when I listened to these mutterings, and wondered whether much brooding on oversea adventures had turned my uncle's brain. And I was not at all prepared for the revelation that came one night, when, looking up from his book, which lay open on his knees, he waved his long pipe in the air and cried, "I'll do it, as sure as my name is Stephen Brent." And then he poured out upon my astonished ears the full tale of his imaginings. He was bent on making a voyage round the world. The South Seas had cast a spell upon him. He longed to see the lands of which the sailor-men had spoken; he was athirst for discovery. Perhaps he might light upon this Southern Continent which had eluded the search of others, and if he could forestall the French, what a feather it would be in his cap, and how glorious for old England! And in these dreams he was not less a man of business. There was vast wealth to be had by bold adventurers; why should not he obtain a share of it, and amass a second fortune for his boys? The greatness of this scheme as he unrolled it before me took my breath away. When I asked how his business would fare in his absence he swept the air with his pipe and declared that Tugwell, his manager, was sober and trustworthy, and he had no fears on that score. I spoke of the perils of shipwreck and pirates, of the Sallee rovers, of the numberless accidents that might befall; but he brushed them all away as things of no account. And then I myself took fire from his own enthusiasm and begged that I might go with him. "No, no, Harry, my boy," he said, kindly enough. "You must stay at home to look after your aunt and the boys. Tugwell is a good man, but growing old; and if anything happens to me you will be at hand to look to things; you are seventeen, and pretty near a man."