But to
draw sense out of that boy was as hard as picking cherries off a
crab-tree. One silly tale he had that he kept on drifting back to,
and to hear him you would have thought that it was the only thing
that happened to him in his life. "We was at anchor," he would say,
"off an island called the Basket of Flowers, and the sailors had
caught a lot of parrots and we were teaching them to swear. Up and
down the decks, up and down the decks, and the language they used
was dreadful. Then we looked up and saw the masts of the Spanish
ship outside the harbour. Outside the harbour they were, so we threw
the parrots into the sea and sailed out to fight. And all the
parrots were drownded in the sea and the language they used was
dreadful." That's the sort of boy he was, nothing but silly talk of
parrots when we asked him about the fighting. And we never had a
chance of teaching him better, for two days after he ran away again,
and hasn't been seen since.
That's my story, and I assure you that things like that are happening
at Fairfield all the time. The ship has never come back, but somehow
as people grow older they seem to think that one of these windy
nights she'll come sailing in over the hedges with all the lost
ghosts on board. Well, when she comes, she'll be welcome. There's one
ghost-lass that has never grown tired of waiting for her lad to
return. Every night you'll see her out on the green, straining her
poor eyes with looking for the mast-lights among the stars.
Pages:
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33