He lay awake all that night. The next morning the sky had cleared and the sun shone down on the gratefully steaming land of green. He breakfasted in the tiny parlour opposite the shop-post-office on the ground floor. The ornaments in it were those of long ago. Prints of the landing of the Guards after the Crimea, of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort. Curiously carved and polished coconut shells, and a great egg on which a staring mermaid was nudely painted stood on the mantelpiece. On the chiffonier were calabashes, with gaudy figures of indigenous Indians, such as came from the West Indies seventy years ago, and a model of a full-rigged ship under a glass case, and a moulting stuffed toucan, with its great beak and yellow and red plumage. The late Mr. Pettiland’s father, he had learned, had followed the sea. So, beside the objects on the crowded mantelpiece and in front of palm-leaf fans were sprigs of white coral and strings of strange beads, and a dumpy, shapeless, wooden Polynesian god. And at the end lay a great conch shell with its wide, pink, curving lips, mysterious and alluring. He could scarcely eat. The night had shaken him. He gulped down some food and coffee, lit a pipe and wandered restlessly about the room, looking at these tokens of the lands far away which he had never seen. The coral fascinated him. In the hospital he had read _Typee_ and _Oomoo_ of Herman Melville in Dent’s cheap collection of classics. The sight of the coral quickened dormant longings. He took the great conch-shell in his hand wondering at its beauty of curve and colour. And as he did so his mind went back to early childhood—to an old aunt whom he occasionally was taken to visit in torturing Sunday clothes sacrosanct from the defilement of jam under dreadful penalties, and who possessed such a shell. He remembered that the shell was the glory that compensated the frigid horror of that house. He would hold it to his ear and listen to the boom of far-off surfs and then go home and mingle the message with the pointing finger of Salvation Yeo. And now, grown man, inured to adventure, he put the shell to his ear, and the message was the same, vibrating the call of oceans thundering on distant beaches through the fibres of his being.