Johnson--or Fred, as I used to call him by this time--only exaggerated
the truth about the shrubs that grow in the greenhouse atmosphere of
South Devon, when he talked of the captain's fuchsia trees being as
big as the old willows by the canal wharf; but the parrots must have
been a complete invention. He said the captain had seven. Two green,
two crimson, two blue, and one violet with an orange-coloured beak and
grey lining to his wings; and that they built nests in the fuchsia
trees of sandal-wood shavings, and lined them with the captain's silk
pocket-handkerchiefs. He said that though the parrots stole the
captain's handkerchiefs, they were all very much attached to him; but
they quarrelled among themselves, and swore at each other in seven
dialects of the West Coast of Africa.

Mrs. Johnson herself once showed me a little print of Dartmouth
harbour, and told me it was supposed that in old times an iron chain
was stretched from rock to rock across its mouth as a means of
defence. And that afternoon Fred told me a splendid story about the
chain, and how it was made of silver, and that each link was worth
twenty pounds, and how at the end where it was fastened with a padlock
every night at sunset, to keep out the French, a lion sat on the ledge
of rock at the harbour's mouth, with the key tied round his neck by a
sea-green ribbon. He had to have a new ribbon on the first Sunday in
every month, Fred said, because his mane dirtied them so fast. A story
which Fred had of his grandfather's single-handed encounter with this
lion on one occasion, when the gallant captain would let a brig in
distress into the harbour after sunset, and the lion would not let him
have the key, raised my opinion of his courage and his humanity to
the highest point. But what he did at home was nothing to the exploits
which Fred recounted of him in foreign lands.