Pretending not to notice my emotion, he went on speaking, so as to allow me time to recover myself.
“Rec’lect this, laddie,” said he, “that my sister Jane and I have neither chick nor child belonging to either of us, and that your presence will be like sunshine in the house. Come along in now, my boy. I’ll give Jane a hail to let her know we’re here in harbour, so that she can pipe down to dinner. Hi—hullo—on deck there!” and, raising his voice, in this concluding shout—just as if he were standing on the poop of a vessel in a heavy gale of wind and hailing a look-out man on the fore-crosstrees—he opened the door of the cottage, motioning me courteously to enter it first.
Chapter Ten.
A Welcome Guest.
The little hall, or passage way, opening out of the porch, in which I now found myself, was like the vestibule to a museum.
It was crammed full, from floor to ceiling, with all sorts of curios, brought from foreign parts, evidently by the worthy owner of the dwelling, when returning home after his many cruisings in strange waters—conch shells from the Congo and cowries from Zanzibar; a swordfish’s broken spear from the Pacific, and a Fijian war-club; cases of stuffed humming-birds from Rio, and calabashes from the Caribbean Sea; a beautiful model, in the finest ivory work, of a Chinese junk on one side, vis-à-vis with a full-rigged English man-of-war on the other; and, above all, in the place of honour, the hideous body of a shark, displaying its systematic rows of triangularly arranged saw-like teeth, now harmless, but once ready to mangle the unwary!
All these objects, of course, immediately attracted my attention, but I had not much time for glancing round the collection; for, almost as soon as we got inside the little hall, a bright-faced middle-aged woman, with jet-black hair and eyes, the very image of my new friend, only much more comely in feature, stepped forward from a room opening out of the other end of the passage.
“Dear me, Sam, is that you?” she cried out in a voice closely resembling his in its cheery accents, although more musical by reason of its feminine ring; “I’m just dishing up, and dinner’ll be ready as soon as the pasty’s done.”