The Pestle and Mortar stood facing the busy wharf at the corner of one of the narrow alleys that led up into the town. The upper windows of the house looked out across the Pool, where all the ships and fishing-boats were harboured. From these upper windows you could, if you had only been there, see down upon the ships' decks and watch the brown-faced seamen at their work of discharging the merchandise that they had brought from distant climes; and in the street below there was the channel where, on wet days, the rain-water rushed by in a deep stream; and where, when the rain had ceased, young Timothy Trollope and his playmates used to go out in their bare feet and sail their tiny boats, and imagine these bits of rough-hewn stick to be Spanish galleons, laden with gold, or corsair galleys with cargoes of Christian captives for the slave-markets of Algiers. Timothy's games had always some connection with ships (which, I suppose, was natural enough, seeing that he had been born and brought up in sight of the sea, and with the smell of tar rope and bilge-water for ever in his nostrils), and all his boyish ambitions were of travel and adventure, fostered, it may be, by the travellers' talk he had heard from the mariners who gossiped with his father in the barber's shop. Many of these adventurous mariners, remembering past benefits that they had received at the hands of the kindly barber-surgeon, or perhaps being short of money (as they ofttimes were, in spite of the vast treasures that they had voyaged and fought for in far-off regions), had given or sold to him many relics of their travels in foreign lands, and the shop was a veritable museum of curiosities from all parts of the known world. Here was a live poll-parrot brought home by one of Sir Richard Grenville's seamen from Virginia; the jaws of a giant shark that had been killed by John Hawkins' boatswain off the west coast of Africa; a Turk's scimitar, a Patagonian's war-club, a red Indian's tobacco-pipe, an Icelander's harpoon, and even some of the so-called gold brought back by Sir Martin Frobisher from distant Greenland. People who had never crossed the seas regarded these things with wonder and reverence, but seamen were wont to scoff at them, and to declare that they were but the sweepings and refuse of ships' cabins. Peter Trollope, however, was proud of his curious collection; and often, when business was slack, he would sit in his chair by the fire and look at the things each in turn, and grumble that Providence had not made him an adventurer instead of a quiet, stay-at-home barber-surgeon. Master Thomas Cavendish, the great explorer, when he was fitting out his ship, the _Hugh Gallant_, for his voyage round the world, had once said to him: