Excerpt from The Lay of the Land: A Collection of Short Stories HE was a mild old man, yet a good deal of fire still lingered in his black exes, with the snowy thatch above. He wore the blue blouse of his people, and the only thing that indicated the seafaring man was the brass hoops in his withered old ears. It was only when he began to talk that we got a whifi of the salt sea; not the sea where the gales blow big guns and tear all sentiment out of the heart of the storm, but the sapphire waters of his own southern Gulf, where the breezes bring with them the rustle of palms and the glint of sunshine on waves which rock as to a cradle song. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.