He had met a townsman, a couple of years before, in some sailor boarding-house in Chile, so that he knew his mother to be still alive.
"She must be a pretty old woman now," he said, staring meditatively into the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison, who was steering a point off the course.
"When did you last write to her ?" He performed his mental arithmetic aloud.

"Eighty-one; no--eighty-two, eh?
no--eighty-three?
Yes, eighty-three.

Ten years ago.

From some little port in Madagascar.

I was trading.
"You see," he went on, as though addressing his neglected mother across half the girth of the earth, "each year I was going home.