He was a thin, mild-mannered man with sandy grey hair, a tiny moustache, and an extraordinary gentle voice; and it was a strange thing that he was only one of many men in those islands who were more familiar with the romantic cities of the East than they were with the capital of their own country. Simon had been struck by that odd fact on his first call at Tregarthen's, and subsequent visits had confirmed it. There, on those lonely clusters of rock breaking out of the sea forty miles from Land's End, where you would expect to find men who had seen scarcely anything of the world outside the other rocky islands around their own homes, you found instead these simple men whose turns of reminiscence recalled the streets of Damascus and Bagdad by their names. And whenever reminiscence turned that way Mr. Smithson Smith would call on his own memories, with a faraway look in his eyes, and the same faraway sound in that very gentle voice, as if his dreams saw the deserts of Arabia more vividly than the blue bay beyond his windows. "I mind a time when I was in Capernaum..." - Simon had heard him say it, and felt that for that man at least all the best days lay in the past. It was the war, of course, that had picked men out of every sleepy hamlet in England and hurled them into the familiarity of strange sights and places as well as the flaming shadows of death, and in the end sent them back to those same sleepy hamlets to remember; but there was in that quiet man a mystic sensitiveness, a tenseness of poetry struggling rather puzzledly for the expression he could not give it, that made his memories more dreamy with a quaint kind of reverence than most others.

Mr. Smithson Smith was oddly afraid of being boring, as if he felt that any mundane restlessness in his audience would break the fragile glamour of those wonderful things he could remember.