Uncle Horace was no mean storyteller himself when they could get him going…which wasn’t always. Around Judy’s kitchen fire in the cool evenings he would loosen up. They heard the tale of his being wrecked on the Magdalens on his first voyage…of the shark crashing through the glass roof of his cabin and landing on the dinner table…of the ghost of the black dog that haunted one of his ships and foreboded misfortune.

“Did you ever see it yourself?” asked David Kirk with a skeptical twist to his lips.

Uncle Horace looked at him witheringly.

“Yes…once,” he said. “Before the mutiny off Bombay.”

His listeners shivered. When Tillytuck and Judy told tales of seeing ghosts nobody minded or believed it. But it was different with Uncle Horace someway. Still, David stuck to his guns. Sailors were always superstitious.

“You don’t mean to say that you really believe in ghosts, Captain Gardiner?”

Uncle Horace looked through David and far away.

“I believe what I see, sir. It may be that my eyes deceived me. Not everybody can see ghosts. It is a gift.”

“A gift I wasn’t dowered with,” said Suzanne, a trifle too complacently. Uncle Horace demolished her with one of those rare looks of his. Suzanne afterwards told Pat that she felt as if that look had bored a hole clean through her and shown her to be hollow and empty.

The next excitement was Amy’s wedding to which everyone at Silver Bush and Swallowfield went through a pouring rain, except Judy and mother. Uncle Horace would not go in the car. It transpired that he had never been in a car and was determined he never would be. So he went with Uncle Tom in the phaeton and got well drenched for his prejudices. It rained all day. But Uncle Horace came back in high good humor.