"Nonsense, Billy; the voice I hear is always quite cheerful and
friendly--not a bit like a dead man's."

"I tell what I'm told," answered Billy, and the subject dropped.

But the boy did not cease thinking about the voice; and some time after
he came, as it seemed, upon a clue. His father had set him to read
Shakespeare; and, taking down the first of twelve volumes from the
shelf, he began upon the first play, _The Tempest_. He was prepared to
yawn, but the first scene flung open a door to him, and he stepped into
a new world, a childish Ferdinand roaming an Isle of Voices.
He resigned Miranda to the grown-up prince, for whom (as he saw at a
glance, being wise in the ways of story-books) she was eminently fitted.
It was in Ariel, perched with harp upon the shrouds of the king's ship,
that he recognised the unseen familiar of his own voyaging. "O spirit,
be my friend--speak to me often!" As children will, he gave Prospero's
island a local habitation in the tangled cliff-garden, tethered Caliban
in the tool-shed, and watched the white surf far withdrawn, or listened
to its murmur between the lordly boles of the red-currant bushes.
For the first time he became aware of some limitations in Billy.

He had long been aware of some serious limitations in his nurse: she
could not, for instance, sail a boat, and her only knot was a "granny."
He never dreamed of despising her, being an affectionate boy; but more
and more he went his own way without consulting her. Yet it was she
who--unconsciously and quite as if it were nothing out of the way--
handed him the clue.

A flagstaff stood in the garden on a grassy platform, half-way down the