“What do you think of this?” I said one evening, as soon as I understood the medium in which his memory worked best, and, before he could expostulate read him the whole of “The Saga of King Olaf!” He listened open-mouthed, flushed his hands drumming on the back of the sofa where he lay, till I came to the Songs of Emar Tamberskelver and the verse: “Emar then, the arrow taking From the loosened string, Answered: ‘That was Norway breaking ‘Neath thy hand, O King.’” He gasped with pure delight of sound. “That’s better than Byron, a little,” I ventured. “Better? Why it’s true! How could he have known?” I went back and repeated: “‘What was that?’ said Olaf, standing On the quarter-deck, ‘Something heard I like the stranding Of a shattered wreck.’” “How could he have known how the ships crash and the oars rip out and go _z-zzp_ all along the line? Why only the other night.... But go back please and read ‘The Skerry of Shrieks’ again.” “No, I’m tired. Let’s talk. What happened the other night?” “I had an awful nightmare about that galley of ours. I dreamed I was drowned in a fight. You see we ran alongside another ship in harbor. The water was dead still except where our oars whipped it up. You know where I always sit in the galley?” He spoke haltingly at first, under a fine English fear of being laughed at. “No. That’s news to me,” I answered, meekly, my heart beginning to beat. “On the fourth oar from the bow on the right side on the upper deck. There were four of us at the oar, all chained. I remember watching the water and trying to get my handcuffs off before the row began. Then we closed up on the other ship, and all their fighting men jumped over our bulwarks, and my bench broke and I was pinned down with the three other fellows on top of me, and the big oar jammed across our backs.” “Well?” Charlie’s eyes were alive and alight. He was looking at the wall behind my chair. “I don’t know how we fought. The men were trampling all over my back, and I lay low. Then our rowers on the left side--tied to their oars, you know--began to yell and back water. I could hear the water sizzle, and we spun round like a cockchafer and I knew, lying where I was, that there was a galley coming up bow-on, to ram us on the left side. I could just lift up my head and see her sail over the bulwarks. We wanted to meet her bow to bow, but it was too late. We could only turn a little bit because the galley on our right had hooked herself on to us and stopped our moving. Then, by gum! there was a crash! Our left oars began to break as the other galley, the moving one y’know, stuck her nose into them. Then the lower-deck oars shot up through the deck-planking, but first, and one of them jumped clean up into the air and came down again close to my head.” “How was that managed?”