THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS
figure in the dun light, and paused where Nelson and Pickles sat. The captain was well on toward fifty and had followed the sea, boy and man, for more than thirty years, just as his father and his father's father before him had followed it. Several generations of Troys had been born within sight and sound of Casco Bay and had taken to the sea as naturally and inevitably as ducks take to water. The captain was a slow-speaking man, with a deep and pleasant voice that could, when occasion demanded, bellow like a liner's fog-horn. He was a good Master, stern but never unjust, and a good father to the boy who sat there holding the front half of the dog across his knees. Nelson not only loved his father very deeply—how deeply he was very soon to realize—but he both admired and respected him. No one could make two trips over and back with Captain Troy, watching his handling of his ship, his behavior in moments of peril and his attitude toward the men under him, without feeling admiration and respect for the simple-minded, big-hearted, cool-thinking man. The fact that Nelson's mother had died when he was eight years of age had focused all his affection on his father, and, since Nelson was an only child, had, on the other hand, concentrated all the captain's love on him. Be-
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