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Who buys beef buys bones,
Who buys land buys stones,
Who buys eggs buys shels,
But who buys ale buys nothing els.

And the pilgrims feigned credulity according as they valued Master Simon’s opinion of their intelligence.

But most welcome of all were the merchant-captains from Ponteglos, among whom custom had made it a point of honour to report themselves at the “Flowing Source” within twenty-four hours after dropping anchor by Ponteglos Quay. When or why or how the custom arose nobody was old enough to remember; but a master mariner would as soon have thought of sailing without log or leadline as of putting in and out of Ponteglos without tasting Master Simon’s ale–“calling for orders,” as they put it. Master Simon had never climbed a sea-going ship except to shake hands with a friend and wish him good passage and return to shore with the pilot; but the teak walls of his parlour were lined with charts of such very remote parts of the globe, and his shelves with such a quantity of foreign china and marine curiosities, and he spoke so familiarly of Galapagos, Batavia, Cape Verde, the Horn, the Straits of Magellan, and so forth, and would bring his telescope so knowingly to bear on the gilt weathercock over Ponteglos church tower, that until you knew the truth you would have sworn half his life had been spent on the quarter-deck. And while the sea-captains–serious men, attired in blue cloth, wearing rings in their ears–sat and smoked canaster and other queer tobaccos in painted china pipes, and talked of countries whose very names conjured up visions of parrots, and carved idols, and sharks, and brown natives in flashing canoes, Master Simon would put a shrewd question or two and wag his head over the answers as a man who hears just what he expected. And sometimes towards the close of the sitting, if he knew his company very well, he would reward them with his favourite and only song, “The Golden Vanitee”:

A ship I have got in the North Countree,
And I had her christened the Golden Vanitee;
O, I fear she’s been taken by a Spanish Gal-a-lee,
As she sailed by the Lowlands low!

In some hazy way he had persuaded himself that the Spanish galleon of the ballad was the very ship whose timbers over-arched him and his audience; and for the moment, being himself inverted (so to speak) by the potency of his own singing, he blew out his chest and straddled out his thick calves and screwed up his eyes, quite as if his roof-tree were right-side-up once more in blue water, and he on deck beside the weather-rail. But the mood began to pass as soon as he bolted the front door behind his guests, and Ann the cook poured him out his last cup of mulled ale and withdrew with the saucepan. And another noon would find him seated under his leaning house-front, his eyes half-closed, his attention divided between the whisper of the tide and the murmur in the pigeon-cotes overhead, his body at ease and his soul content. His was a happy life–or had been, but for two crumpled rose-leaves.

To begin with, there were those confounded pot-boys. It puzzled Master Simon almost as much as it annoyed him; he paid fair wages and passed for a good employer; but he could not keep a pot-boy for twelve months. As a matter of fact, I know the river to have been the bottom of the mischief–the river, and perhaps the talk of the ship-captains. It might satisfy Master Simon to sit and watch the salmon passing up in autumn towards their spawning beds, and rubbing, as they went, their scales against his landing-stage to clear them of the sea-lice; to watch them and their young passing seaward in the early spring; to watch and wait and spread his nets in the due season. But for the youngsters this running water was a constant lure–the song of it and the dimple on it. It coaxed them, as it coaxed the old galleon, to lean over and listen. And the moment that listening became intolerable, they were off. Only one of them–the poet before mentioned–had ever expressed any desire to return and revisit–