FORE:"But such fans! such fans! They were so pretty that we couldn't keep our eyes off them, and we bought more of them, perhaps, than we needed. In one shop we would find something so nice that we couldn't see how it could be surpassed, and so we would buy it; and in the next we found something nicer yet, and so we had to buy that. Anybody who has a liking for fans, and hasn't a mint of money, had better keep out of the stores of Canton, or he will run a risk of being ruined. The varieties are so great that we cannot begin to name them. There were fans on silk, and fans on paper; fans carved in ivory, tortoise-shell, sandal-wood; fans of feathers from various birds, with rich paintings right on the surface of the feathers; and a great many[Pg 420] other fans besides. There was one with frame and sticks of sandal-wood, beautifully carved, while the body was of painted silk. There were groups of figures on each side of the fan, and each figure had a face painted on ivory which was afterwards glued to the silk. It was the prettiest thing to be found for any price we could afford, and you can be sure that it was secured for somebody at home.

FORE:

FORE:

FORE:"And yet you never take a lady's name for granted?"

FORE:He had grown to detest the time after dinner passed in the plushy, painted drawing-room. Hitherto, in all these years of increasing prosperity, during which the conscious effort of his brain had been directed to business and money-making, he had not objected after the work of the day to pass a quiescent hour or two before his early bedtime giving half an ear to his wife��s babble, which, with her brain thickened with refreshment, always reached its flood-tide of voluble incoherence now, giving half an eye to Alice with her industrious{291} needle. All the time a vague simmer of mercantile meditation gently occupied him; his mind, like some kitchen fire with the damper pushed in, kept itself just alight, smouldered and burned low, and Alice��s needle was but like the bars of the grate, and his wife��s prattle the mild rumble of water in the boiler. It was all domestic and normal, in accordance with the general destiny of prosperous men in middle age. Indeed, he was luckier in some respects than the average, for there had always been for him his secret garden, the hortus inclusus, into which neither his family nor his business interests ever entered. Now even that had been invaded, Norah��s catalogue had become to him the most precious of his books: she was like sunshine in his secret garden or like a bitter wind, something, anyhow, that got between him and his garden beds, while here in the drawing-room in the domestic hour after dinner the fact of her made itself even more insistently felt, for she turned Lady Keeling��s vapidities, to which hitherto he had been impervious, into an active stinging irritation, and even poor Alice��s industrious needle and the ever-growing pattern of Maltese crosses on Mr Silverdale��s slippers was like some monotonous recurring drip of water that set his nerves on edge. This was a pretty state of mind, he told himself, for a hardheaded business man of fifty, and yet even as with all the force of resolution that was in him he tried to find something{292} in his wife��s remarks that could awake a relevant reasonable reply, some rebellious consciousness in his brain would only concern itself with counting on the pink clock the hours that lay between the present moment and nine o��clock next morning. And then the pink clock melodiously announced on the Westminster chime that it was half past ten, and Alice put her needle into the middle of the last Maltese cross, and Lady Keeling waddled across the room and tapped the barometer, which a marble Diana held in her chaste hand, to see if the weather promised well for the bazaar to-morrow. The evening was over, and there would not be another for the next twenty-four hours.

FORE:"That same captain," he continued, "was once out for a whale, but when they killed him, they were ten miles from the ship. The captain got on the dead whale, and sent the boat back to let the ship know where they were. After they had gone, a storm came on and drove the ship away, and there the captain stayed three weeks. He stuck an oar into the whale to hang on to, and the third week a ship hove in sight. As he didn't know what she was, he hoisted the American flag, which he happened to have a picture of on his pocket-handkerchief; and pretty soon the ship hung out her colors, and her captain came on board. Captain Sammis was tired of the monotony of life on a whale, and so he sold out his interest to the visitor. He got half the oil and a passage to Honolulu, where he found his own craft all right."