"Ay! When I was no older than you. Half a crown I had in my pocket, I remember. It was all the start in life I ever got."
John put down his spoon and stared at his grandfather earnestly, eagerly, admiringly.
"You're a self-made man!" he said. And old as the Captain was, and young as was his admirer, he warmed pleasantly at the words.
"Ay!" he said exultingly, "I'm a self-made man right enough. Every bit of me! I started life as an errand boy in the London slums, and it seemed for a time as if I was going to die an errand boy in the London slums. At least, it might have seemed so to most people. I'd made up my mind how it was to be, how it had got to be."
"What did you do?" asked John eagerly.
"Do—well, I had about a year at errand running and then I got a chance to go to sea, and I took it. I went first to China. By gad, how well I remember that trip!"
And forthwith he launched into a sea-story more enthralling by far to the boy than any in that library so stocked with sea-stories.
At dinner again, at night, the talk was the same. The usually silent ruminative old man was positively loquacious, and John gave him a rapt attention.
When nine o'clock struck a dim remembrance come to the boy that he was still a pupil of Wygate School and had home tasks to prepare for the morrow.
But he had slipped too far out of his groove to go back again that night.