"Whereabouts will yer land, Captain?" he asked when they were fairly under way.
"Wherever there is a path upwards. Who is the owner of the castle?"
"The castle? Well, there ain't many rightly knows just what his name is," answered Charon, cocking his gray eye rather quizzically. "Some says one thing, some another. I have heard tell he was Davy Jones himself!"
"Have you ever seen him?"
"Well, I don't know; I've seen something that might have been him; but there's no telling! he can fix himself up to look like pretty much anything, they say. There ain't many calls up to the castle, anyway."
"Why not?"
"Well, there's a big wall all around the place, for one thing, and never a gate in it; so without yer dives under ground and up again, there don't seem no easy way of getting in."
"Does the owner never come out, then?"
"Well, he can get out, I expect, when he wants to," replied the wrinkled humorist, with a weather-beaten grin. "They do say he whips off on a broomstick about once a month and steers for Bos-ton!" His fashion of utterance was a leisurely sing-song, like the roll of a vessel anchored in a ground-swell.
"Why does he go there?" demanded Prince Balder, with the air of finding nothing extravagant or improbable in the sailor's yarn. The latter (a little doubting whether his interlocutor were a simpleton or a "deep one") answered, after a moment's pause,—to replenish his imagination perhaps,—