Cross with his aunt and in the pleasant country roads with Mr. Beale. And he wondered how he could ever have dreamed such things.
Quite soon came the day when the nurse dressed him in clothes strange, but strangely comfortable and fine, and carried him to the window, from which, as he sat in a big oak chair, he could see the green fields that sloped down to the river, and the rigging and the masts of the ships that went up and down. The rigging looked familiar, but the shape of the ships was quite different. They were shorter and broader than the ships that Dickie Harding had been used to see, and they, most of them, rose up much higher out of the water.
"I should like to go and look at them closer," he told the nurse.
"Once thou'rt healed," she said, "thou'lt be for ever running down to the dockyard. Thy old way—I know thee, hearing the master mariners' tales, and setting thy purpose for a galleon of thine own and the golden South Americas."
"What's a galleon?" said Dickie. And was told. The nurse was very patient with his forgettings.
He was very happy. There seemed somehow to be more room in this new life than in the old one, and more time. No one was in a hurry, and there was not another house within a quarter of a mile. All green fields. Also he was a person of consequence. The servants called him "Master Richard," and he felt, as he heard
