He would stand in the doorway of Laura’s home and look out at the wheat fields billowing in the breeze and the white clouds hurrying over them, and say: “All very fine; but it seems a bit dead to me, right away from the sea, like this.” And he would tell the children how the waves pile up in a storm, “like the wall of a house coming down on your ship,” and about other seas, calm and bright as a looking-glass, with little islands and palm trees-but treacherous, too—and treacherous little men living in palm leaf huts, “their faces as brown as your frock, Laura.” Once he had been shipwrecked and spent nine days in an open boat, the last two without water. His tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth and he had spent weeks after rescue in hospital.

“And yet,” he would say, “I’d dearly love just one more trip; but my dear wife would cry her eyes out if I mentioned it, and the business, of course, couldn’t be left. No. I’ve swallowed the anchor, all right. I’ve swallowed the anchor.”

Mr. Wilkins brought the image of the real living sea to the end house; otherwise the children would have only known it in pictures. True, their mother in her nursing days had been to the seaside with her charges and had many pleasant stories to tell of walks on piers, digging on sands, gathering seaweed, and shrimping with nets. But the seaside was different—delightful in its way, no doubt, but nothing like the wide tumbling ocean with ships on it.

The only portion of the sea which came their way was contained in a medicine bottle which a hamlet girl in service at Brighton brought home as a curiosity. In time the bottle of sea-water became the property of a younger sister, a school-fellow of Laura’s, who was persuaded to barter it for a hunch of cake and a blue-bead necklace. Laura treasured it for years.

Many casual callers passed through the hamlet. Travelling tinkers with their barrows, braziers, and twirling grindstones turned aside from the main road and came singing:

Any razors or scissors to grind?

Or anything else in the tinker’s line?

Any old pots or kettles to mend?

After squinting into any leaking vessel against the light, or trying the edges of razors or scissors upon the hard skin of their palms, they would squat by the side of the road to work, or start their emery wheel whizzing, to the delight of the hamlet children, who always formed a ring around any such operations.