Strange to think that the shabby little man at my side had them all fast locked, pictures upon pictures, in his brain, and as we were talking was back again in goodness knows what remote latitude.
I kept looking at him and saying, "Twenty-two thousand miles of sea! sixty-seven! and builds his own cottage!" In addition to all this he had found time to be twenty-one years a policeman, and to beget and rear successfully twelve children.

He was now, I gathered, living partly on his pension, and spoke of this daughter married, this daughter in service here, and that daughter in service there, one son settled in London and another in the States, with something of a patriarchal pride, with the independent air too of a man who could honestly say to himself that, with few advantages from fortune, having had, so to say, to work his passage, every foot and hour of it, across those twenty-two thousand miles and those sixty-seven years, he had made a thoroughly creditable job of his life.
As we walked along I caught glimpses in his vivid and ever-varying talk of the qualities that had made his success possible.

They are always the same qualities! A little pile of half-hewn stones, the remains of a ruined wall, scattered by the roadside caught his eye.
"I've seen the time when I wouldn't have left them stones lying out there," he said, and presently, "Why, God bless you, I've made my own boots before to-day.

Give me the tops and I'll soon rig up a pair still." And with all his success, and his evident satisfaction with his lot, the man was neither a prig nor a teetotaller.

He had probably seen too much of the world to be either.