"What a lovely day it is, Mrs. Coombes! It is so bright over the sea," I said, going to the one little window which looked out on the great Atlantic, "that one almost expects a great merchant navy to come sailing into Kilkhaven--sunk to the water's edge with silks, and ivory, and spices, and apes, and peacocks, like the ships of Solomon that we read about--just as the sun gets up to the noonstead." Before I record her answer, I turn to my reader, who in the spirit accompanies me, and have a little talk with him. I always make it a rule to speak freely with the less as with the more educated of my friends. I never _talk down_ to them, except I be expressly explaining something to them. The law of the world is as the law of the family. Those children grow much the faster who hear all that is going on in the house. Reaching ever above themselves, they arrive at an understanding at fifteen, which, in the usual way of things, they would not reach before five-and-twenty or thirty; and this in a natural way, and without any necessary priggishness, except such as may belong to their parents. Therefore I always spoke to the poor and uneducated as to my own people,--freely, not much caring whether I should be quite understood or not; for I believed in influences not to be measured by the measure of the understanding. But what was the old woman's answer? It was this: "I know, sir. And when I was as young as you"--I was not so very young, my reader may well think--"I thought like that about the sea myself. Everything come from the sea. For my boy Willie he du bring me home the beautifullest parrot and the talkingest you ever see, and the red shawl all worked over with flowers: I'll show it to you some day, sir, when you have time. He made that ship you see in the frame there, sir, all with his own knife, out on a bit o' wood that he got at the Marishes, as they calls it, sir--a bit of an island somewheres in the great sea. But the parrot's gone dead like the rest of them, sir.--Where am I? and what am I talking about?" she added, looking down at her knitting as if she had dropped a stitch, or rather as if she had forgotten what she was making, and therefore what was to come next. "You were telling me how you used to think of the sea--" "When I was as young as you. I remember, sir. Well, that lasted a long time--lasted till my third boy fell asleep in the wide water; for it du call it falling asleep, don't it, sir?" "The Bible certainly does," I answered.