Sometimes he brought Mr.Tredgold and sometimes Mr.Tredgold brought him.

The terrors of the crow's-nest vanished before his persevering attacks, and perched there with the captain's glass he swept the landscape with the air of an explorer surveying a strange and hostile country.
It was a fitting prelude to the captain's tales afterwards, and Mr.
Chalk, with the stem of his long pipe withdrawn from his open mouth, would sit enthralled as his host narrated picturesque incidents of hairbreadth escapes, or, drawing his chair to the table, made rough maps for his listener's clearer understanding.

Sometimes the captain took him to palm-studded islands in the Southern Seas; sometimes to the ancient worlds of China and Japan.

He became an expert in nautical terms.

He walked in knots, and even ordered a new carpet in fathoms--after the shop-keeper had demonstrated, by means of his little boy's arithmetic book, the difference between that measurement and a furlong.
[Illustration: "Sometimes the captain took him to palm-studded islands in the Southern Seas."] "I'll have a voyage before I'm much older," he remarked one afternoon, as he sat in the captain's sitting-room.