The boy opened his blue eyes very widely indeed, and stared wonderingly at the little man.
“What! live in an old windmill?”
“Yes, lad, yes. I’m a student, you know, and I want quiet, and this old house will just suit me. I’m going to work out some wonderful problems. Then I’m going to make a big, big fortune. And pray, boy, what are you going to be?”
“Well, you know, Dr. Parker wants to take me as an apprentice, but I don’t like nasty physic, and so I’m going to be a sailor.
“‘The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free.’
“You know that verse, sir, I suppose. But it isn’t fresh at all. It’s dreadfully salt, because when I have fallen off a rock I have swallowed big mouthfuls of the water, and oh, it was nasty!
“Yet I love the sea all the same, and the beautiful birds that go skimming and wheeling over it or float on the blue smooth water. Oh, shouldn’t I like to be a sea-bird, just. That is, you know,” he added, after a pause, “if mother and Phœbe could be sea-birds too. Then we would all fly away together and be happy ever after.”
The queer little man laughed.
It wasn’t an ordinary laugh his. It was a kind of weird cachinnation in a piping voice. I have heard just such laughter proceeding from the dark recesses of gloomy forests in Africa. Birds, perhaps. Perhaps apes or baboons. But this little man’s voice seemed to be far, far older than himself.
“And now, dearie,” he said, “do you feel strong enough to go home?”