My uncle Franklin, who was dead, had been a taxidermist. But it is not about either of them that I want to tell you. They had a son, Ephraim Franklin, a sailor. Whenever I went to see my aunt Franklin she was sitting in the room behind the shop. This room and the shop were filled with cases of stuffed animals and fish and butterflies and in this gloomy north facing little room, always so dull that even the colours of the butterflies seemed like dusty paint and the eyes of the animals as dull as shoe buttons, my aunt Franklin would sit talking or thinking about her son. His ship was called The Mary Porter and she was a sailing ship, a square rigger. Her port was Greenock and she made a fairly regular passage to Australia, taking a hundred days, even a hundred and fifty days; or she would be outward bound for Singapore, to await new orders there, going down afterwards to New Guinea, or Java, or Celebes, or Sumatra, or Borneo. And so because of this, because it took The Mary Porter a hundred and fifty days out and perhaps a hundred and fifty days back, the most my Aunt Franklin could ever hope to see her son was once a year.
