"And tell her," said he, "that I will come on Monday morning at nine o'clock as usual." "Yes, sir." I turned to go. I could not see his face in the gloom of the alley, but I had caught one glimpse of it by the lamplight within, and knew what had detained him upstairs. Honest man, he was starving, and had been praying up there to be delivered from temptation. "Brooks," said he, as I turned, "they tell me your father was once a major in the Army. Is he, by chance, the same Major Brooks--Major James Brooks, of the King's Own--I had the honour to bring home in the _Londonderry_, after Corunna?" "That must have been my father, sir." "A good man and a brave one. I am glad to hear he is recovered." I told him in a word or two of my father's health and of his blindness. "And he lives not far from here?" I remembered afterwards that his voice shook upon the question. I described Minden Cottage and its position on the road towards Plymouth. He cut me short hurriedly, and remarked, with a nervous laugh, that he must be getting back to his pupil. Whereat I, too, laughed. "Do you think it wrong of me, boy?" he asked abruptly. "Wrong, sir?" "He insists upon coming; and he pays me. He will never learn anything. By the way, Brooks, I have been inhospitable. An apple, for instance?" I declared untruthfully that I never ate apples; and perhaps the lie was pardonable, since by it I escaped eating Captain Branscome's Sunday dinner. CHAPTER V. THE WHALEBOAT. A barber's pole protruded beside the ope leading to Captain Coffin's lodgings. It was painted in spirals of scarlet and blue, and at the end of it a cage containing a grey parrot dangled over the footway. "Drunk again!" screamed the parrot, as I hesitated before the entrance, for the directing-marks just here were so numerous as to be perplexing. To the right of the alley the barber had affixed his signboard, close above the base of his pole; to the left a flanking slopshop dangled a row of cast-off suits, while immediately overhead was nailed a board painted over with ornate flourishes and the legend-- "G. Goodfellow. Carpenter and House-Decorator, &c. Repairs Neatly Executed. Instruction in the Violin. Funerals at the Shortest Notice. Shipping Supplied." "Drunk again!" repeated the parrot. "Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me! Oh, you nasty image! Kiss me, kiss me! Who killed the Portugee?" "He don't mean you," explained the barber, reassuringly, emerging at that moment from his shop with a pannikin of water for the parrot's cage, which he lowered very deftly by means of a halliard reeved through a block at the end of the pole. "He means old Coffin. Nice bird, hey?" He slipped a hand through the cage-door, and caressed him, scratching his head. "If you please, sir," said I, "it's Captain Coffin I'm looking for." "Drunk again!" screamed the bird. "Damn my giblets, drunk again!" "He don't like Coffin, and that's a fact," said the barber.