Mediterranean was a known and experienced cruising ground; and when the Sycorax, detailed to escort convoys through the intricacies of the Ægean Archipelago, awaited her slow-moving charges in the netted and landlocked harbour of Megalovadi, in the Island of Ipsilon, Engineer-Lieutenant Spenlove, R. N. R., said he remembered being there eight or nine years ago, loading for Rotterdam.

The others looked at him and then back at the enormous marble cliffs which threw shadows almost as solid as themselves upon the waters of the little bay, almost a cove. It was not so much that they expected Spenlove to tell them a story as that these men had not yet tired of each other's idiosyncrasies—another way of saying the Sycorax was a happy ship. The infiltration of landsmen, in the persons of surgeon and paymaster, the occasional glimpses of one another caught during their sundry small actions with the enemy, kept their intercourse sweet and devoid of those poisonous growths of boredom and slander which too often accumulate upon a body of men at sea like barnacles on the hull.

And in addition Spenlove was easy to look at, for he never returned the glance. He was a solidly built man of forty odd, with a neat gray beard and carefully tended hair. The surgeon once said Spenlove resembled an ambassador more than an engineer, and Spenlove, without in any way moving from his customary pose of alert yet placid abstraction, had murmured absently:

"On one occasion, I was an ambassador. I will tell you about it some time."

"Rotterdam?" observed Inness the paymaster—Inness was an Oxford man who had married into a wealthy merchant's family. He said "Rotterdam" because he had once been there.

"Yes," said Spenlove. "Rotterdam for Krupp's of Essen. For three years Krupp's took a hundred thousand tons per annum of high-grade ore out of this little island alone. They took it in British bottoms to Rotterdam, and from there it went by way of their interminable canals to Essen. I know because I helped to take it. It was just about the time, too, that Chamberlain was preaching his crusade against the evils of Germany dumping her steel below cost price on our markets, and I was so indignant about it that I wrote to the newspapers. I often wrote to the newspapers in those days. I suppose we all catch the disease at some time or other. As a rule, of course, nothing happened save that the letter would not be printed, or else printed full of mistakes, with the vital paragraphs omitted for 'lack of space.' This letter wasn't printed either, but I received one in return from a fiery young member of Parliament who had just been returned on the Protective Tariff ticket. He asked for full details, which I sent to him. I believe he tried to make a question of it in the House, but he ran up against the Consular Service, and that did for him. You see, our Consul here was named Grünbaum.

"More than that," went on Mr. Spenlove, sitting upright in his deck-chair and looking attentively at a near-by ventilator; "more than that, Mr. Grünbaum was resident concessionaire of the mining company, he owned the pumping-plant which irrigates yonder valley, he was connected by marriage with the Greek governor of the Island, who lives over in the tiny capital of Ipsilon, and he, Grünbaum, was the richest man in the Cyclades. That was his house, that big square white barn with the three tall windows and the outside staircase. He was a man of enormous size and weight, and I daresay the people of the Island thought him a god. He certainly treated them most humanely. Every widow was pensioned by him, which was not very much after all, for they used to have precious little use for money. You could get a bottle of wine and a great basket of grapes and figs for a piece of soap, I remember. He built churches for them, too, like that one perched up there on the rock above his house—snow-white with a blue dome. You may have noticed the other day in the wireless news that the friends of freedom in Greece polished off a few of what were described as reactionaires. Put them up against a wall and pumped mannlicher bullets into them. One of these obstacles to liberty was named Grünbaum, I observed.

"But what I was going to tell you about was a man who was at one time in Grünbaum's employ, a man whom I had run against before, a Captain Macedoine. I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of him. He was a very remarkable man for all that. He wasn't a captain at all, really, you know. As it happens, I knew that much about him a long while back, when I was in the Maracaibo Line, running with mails, passengers, and fruit between Colombian ports and New Orleans. No; they were absorbed long ago. The big Yucatan Steamship Company opened its big jaws one day and gulped down the Maracaibo outfit at one swallow. And we all had to come home. It was a fairly lucrative billet while it lasted, and Macedoine, who was a chief steward, may have put by a good bit of money. He had that reputation, and judging by experience I should say at least half of what we heard was true. But what interested me when I was sailing with him was his character, as revealed by his hobby. For it was a hobby with him and a fairly expensive one, too, posing as an educated man of old family. It was the great preoccupation of his life. You might almost be justified in calling him an artist. He was a big, solemn, clean-shaven person, with an air of haughtiness which impressed passengers tremendously. It was this air which got him the nick-name of captain, and it stuck. Two or three young girls, who were making the trip, came up to him the first day out, and one of them exclaimed, 'Oh, Captain, can we ...' something or other. The skipper was a dried-up little shell-back who hated passengers and never came down on the promenade deck at all. The bell-hop, an immoral little demon in buttons, who had come from a reformatory, heard the remark and in a few minutes it was all over the pantry and glory-hole. 'Captain Macedoine.' When he gave one of the scullions a calling down next day, the man, a typical Louisiana nigger, answered in the inevitable musical drawl: 'All right, sah, Captain Macedoine!' It stuck. It hit the popular fancy. More than that, it hit his own fancy, too, for when he went home to England, 'retired on a competency,' as he phrased it, he retired as Captain Macedoine; late of the American Merchant Marine.

"But that was only a side issue. He let it be known, in the subtlest possible manner, that he was of ancient lineage. He had been heard to speak of Alexander of Macedon! Yes, you laugh; but you have not been to sea as long as I have. Such things are possible at sea. I have had a second engineer from Sunderland, a chap named Philip, who claimed Philip of Spain as his ancestor. There was Captain Gizzard, in my old London employ, who had a genealogical tree which traced the old fraud's descent from the Guiscards of Sicily. No! Captain Macedoine's illusions are common enough, I fancy, among men. It was only that instead of trying to master them and clear them away, he cultivated them until they grew to monstrous proportions and he lost sight of reality altogether. Or if you like, he was an artist, working upon himself as material, like those old masters we read about who devoted their lives to the accomplishment of obscure technical excellences that only the cognoscenti could discover and enjoy."

"Possibly," murmured the Surgeon, smiling in the darkness of the evening.

"Well," said Mr. Spenlove, in a musing tone, "of course a certain latitude of analogy is permitted in describing one man to another, if we ever can describe him. That was how Macedoine struck me. The aim of his art was to conceal the artist, which I understand is sound aesthetics. And it was impossible not to admire his method, his style, if you like. There was nothing crude in it. So far from leaving nothing to chance, he left everything to chance. Take the case of his daughter. The brat in those days was a god-send to him. I used to think she was merely an invention, he