"It's you, is it?" said Kep, throwing open the casement. "Come in, Bob, and have your supper."
And Bob did. He ate and seemed thankful, and then spread his great white wings and flew out into the night and the darkness, taking the largest piece of meat with him.
As, like a true manly boy, Kep slept with open windows, and didn't put his light out until he had done reading by his small table, great bats often flew in, and did not leave until the candle was extinguished. Then seeing a distant star perhaps, they flew out towards that.
In this turret chamber Kep was high above the rookery, and could in February look down into the nests. But the birds all knew Kep.
When the boy tired of reading, then he crept into bed. He said his prayers, repeated some Latin hymns to himself, and soon after that--the sea-poems. One after another these sea-poems of his used to spread themselves out before him, and indeed he seemed part and parcel of the poem itself, and is it any wonder that he should go to sleep right in the middle of one of them, the waking thoughts merging into delightful sea, seldom terrifying, dreams, and these into the sweetest, soundest kind of sleep that any young lad e'er enjoyed.
Mermaids were not realities. They belonged to the folk-lore of the ocean. Yet there were some nights he used to delight to dwell with them in their diamond-lit caves far down among the brown trailing sea-weed. He would imagine their revels and mingle with sea-fairies in their gladsome dances, or sit on rocks full fifty fathoms deep with strange wee water babies, listening to their stories or telling them stories of his own. Meanwhile there would be music everywhere in those fairy submarine gardens, for even the floating sea-weed emitted sweet sounds; the very sand was musical, and from under rocks or from caves came the songs of the sea-folk and the tinkle of lutes. And down there the mermaid peoples dwelt and would dwell ever and ever and ever, always, always happy and gay.
But the scene is changed--it is another sea-poem, but true, and tells its own story of the wonders of the mighty deep. For sailors who had been to the far-off northern seas had told him that oft-times when the ship was becalmed in a lonely expanse of ocean, mayhap a thousand miles wide, a solitary whale would be sighted, rising and falling on the sea's dark bosom, but heading steadily southwards, never varying a single point. What guided the lonesome leviathan? What story had it to tell could it but speak? Had it no friends? Had the great beast been deserted by all it had loved, and was it, with the sorrow of night at its heart, moving, sailing, plunging southwards and southwards, reckless, forsaken, unheeding, to be stranded on a reef and to die?
Mother Carey's chickens, the stormy petrels, were another sea-poem to Kep. He could see in his mind's eye the rise and fall of the stern of a big black ship, the quickly obliterated wake, the spume of a wind-tortured ocean, and across and across, darting over, darting under, these mysterious chips of darkness, the petrels, and he could hear their quick sharp shriek--was it a song or was it a wail? Did it portend joy to the crew, or sorrow and a sailor's grave? Bird of mystery! Ah, yes, but what a poem!
A shoal of porpoises. They seemed always busy always merry--diving, gambolling around a ship on voyage. Then dashing off again or disappearing over the horizon, followed by blessings from the seamen for the luck they always bring.
These are but samples of this strange boy's sea-poems. He would hear many more before he left his teens.