'Oh, Isaac, do you think he'll go to America, when he's grown up, like Peter?' 'No, Mary, he'll not go farther than Land's End by land, or Mount's Bay by sea, if what I feel is the truth. We've given him to the Lord, and I say the Lord will lend him to us.' Mary said under her breath, 'Oh, please, Lord Jesus,' several times over, with her eyes tight shut, as she did when she seemed to pray best. Her first son had been drowned at sea, her second had run away from home and gone to America; and she hardly dared think of what would happen to this one. But they had done what they could. Would not God watch over him, and would he not be kind to her because she had given up some of her rights in the child? The child grew strong and gentle; he learned quickly what he was taught, and when he had learned it he would set himself to think out what it really meant, and why it meant that and not something else. He was always good to his mother, and as soon as he had learned to read he would read to her out of a few books which she cared for, the Bible chiefly, and Bogatzky's 'Golden Treasury,' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' Through reading it over and over to his mother, he got to know a good part of the Bible by heart, and he was always asking what this and that puzzling passage meant exactly, and, when he got no satisfying answer, trying to puzzle out a meaning for himself. Every day he went in to the Wesleyan day-school at St. Ives, and as he walked there and back along the cliff-path, generally alone, all sorts of whimsical ideas turned over in his head, ideas that came to him out of books, and out of what people said, and out of the queer world in which he found himself, half land and half water. It was always changing about him and yet always there, in the same place, with its regular and yet unaccountable tides and harvests. Sometimes there was a storm at sea and all the boats did not come back, and the people he had talked with yesterday had gone, like the stone he kicked over the cliff in walking, or he saw them carried up the beach with covered faces. Death is always about the life of fishermen, and he saw it more visibly and a thing more natural and expected than it must seem to most children. He had always loved the sea, and it was his greatest delight to be taken out when the pilchards were in the bay, and to sit in the boat watching the silver shoals as they crowded into the straining net. He waited for the cry of 'Heva!' from the watchman on the hill, and often sat beside him, or stared out to sea through his long telescope, longing to be the first to catch the moving glitter of silver. He talked with the men 'like a grown-up chap' they said, and they talked with him as if he were a man, telling him stories, not the stories they would have told children, but things out of their own lives, and ideas that came into their heads as they lay out at sea all night in the drift-boats.