I am writing these last few lines, telling of the end of my youthful wanderings, by an open window that looks out across the sunlit sea, where the Goodwins sleep peacefully amidst the summer blue, and the idle shipping lingers in the Downs by the hazy Sandwich shore.
Down in the garden I can see a white-haired old man sitting on a bench enjoying a cigarette which the deft fingers of Isabel have just rolled and lit for him. The pair are watching a burly old man who is rigging a flagstaff with the help of a tall, sturdy boy; and as the former turns to his assistant with a wry, genial smile, I see that the brown, wrinkled face is that of my old friend Captain Bithery.
My papers lie upon the ancient desk that my father-in-law brought with him when he left Africa for good—the desk on which good Master Barnabas Hogg was wont to write up his "Journall," when Charles the First was King; and I look around upon other mementoes of the stirring days of my youth. And especially upon a little cotton bag that hangs on the wall hard by. In it is a tablet of baked clay, on one side of which is scratched in rough Arabic characters, "Praise be to God," while the other bears the inscription, in my wife's handwriting, "Aminé loveth thee."
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