was so circumstantial in his subtly shaded allusions. You might say that if she hadn't existed, the trend of his emotional development, the scheme on which he was engaged, would have compelled him to invent her. As I say, I did believe at one time he had invented her, for he was always inventing something. In some bewildering, indefinable way, we became aware, week by week, month by month, of a fresh touch, a new phase of Captain Macedoine. I don't pretend to know what final frame he proposed to give to the magnificent picture he was making. Perhaps he didn't know himself. Perhaps he had no ultimate design. Anyhow we never had it, for as I said, the company was absorbed and we all had to come home.

"I admit I was surprised enough when I found out, quite accidentally, that he had married an octaroon. When I say married, I mean of course, as far as fidelity and maintenance was concerned. He rented a cottage out on Tchoupitoulas Street, where the mosquitoes sing loud enough to drown conversation, and the grass grows man-high between the road and the sidewalk. And there the woman lived a while and died. I was never in the house, but young Strellett, the second steward, who was lost when the Toro turned over in the Yucatan channel, was married and lived not far from Macedoine's ménage, and I can imagine the place. Strellett had a little three-roomed box where he lived with his big rosy-cheeked Irish wife, and there was something very homelike about it, for all the carpets and curtains and a good deal of the table-linen had come from the Maracaibo Line's cabins. Sent ashore to be cleaned, you know, and didn't get back. I dare say Macedoine's place was even more completely furnished at the company's expense. They all did it. Perhaps that was one of the reasons we all had to come home. That was ... yes, more than twenty years ago.

"I'm afraid, though, there were not many of us like Macedoine. We didn't come home to retire on a competency. New Orleans used to be what they called 'a wide-open little town' and there were plenty of ways of getting rid of our wages, good as they were. However, that's a detail. We came home, except one or two youngsters who struck west and got into Nevada mining plants or San Francisco lumber ships. I was glad to come. I had a few shots in the locker and I went down into Hampshire to see my people. I didn't stay as long as I intended. Who of us ever does? After the first glow of welcome dies away, we have to depend on our personal attractions to keep people interested. We may keep the ball rolling a little longer if we get married or even engaged; but it is a sorry business after all. You fellows are for ever wanting the ship to go home. Well, you wait and see. You'll be glad to be back. When a man has got the sea-habit, his relations always regard him as a bit of a nuisance.

"I went to sea again. I joined a London Company which I always call now 'my old company' because I was so long with them, and have for them a peculiar sort of cantankerous affection. They paid infernally poor wages, they were always in a hole financially until the war made them multi-millionaires, and their accommodation was pretty poor. But for some reason or other men stayed with them. I believe it was because we were working for a private firm and not for one of those gigantic corporations without soul to be damned or body to be kicked, as the saying is. The firm were real people to us. They came down to see the ship in London River. Old Gannet—it was Gannet, Prawle and Co.—used to leave a ten-pound note on the Chief's wash-stand after he'd had a yarn and a cigar. Young Gannet, home for the holidays from Winchester College, would come down to St. Katherine's Dock and make himself squiffy with Madeira the skipper had brought home from the Islands. Prawle had been an office boy when old Gannet was young, and had worked up to a partnership and married Daisy Gannet. Smartest man on the Baltic Exchange, they used to say. Yes, their ships were fierce, but men stayed in them. Even now, with old Gannet dead and Prawle retired, and the management paying poor whiskey-soaked young Gannet three thousand a year to keep out of the office, the old skippers and chiefs are still ploughing the ocean for them. You see, we know their ways.

"I went to sea, and kept on at it. You might say it was force of habit, for I must admit I could have had jobs ashore in those days. Not now. But then I could. But it grows on one, going to sea. And I was making friends. There's nothing like a ship-mate who is a friend. The mere fact of you or him joining another ship and sailing away is nothing. When you meet again you take up the tale where you dropped it, years before, half the world away. But you must be young. It is impossible to weld friendships when the heat of youth has gone out. Interests, family ties, danger, sorrow, all may do something, but only when you are young can you make the friendships that nothing can destroy."

Mr. Spenlove paused, and for a moment there was no sound save the purr of the dynamos under their feet, the soft swish and suck of the waves flowing in and out of the under-cut marble cliffs, and the steady tramp of the Quartermaster patrolling to and fro at the gangway. One of the noticeable points about Spenlove was that he fitted into no standard gauge. Neither the Surgeon nor the Oxonian could "place" him precisely, they would confess. Nor could the more experienced lieutenants, highly certificated gentlemen from the Liverpool to New York Ferry steamers. With unconscious humour they "wondered such a man should go to sea." The notion that the sea should be peopled exclusively with moral and intellectual derelicts dies hard. The fact was, Mr. Spenlove was a connoisseur of humanity. He seemed to have met so many types that he unconsciously addressed himself to the fundamentals. He took the inevitable superficial features of one's character for granted. This made him easy to accept but difficult to understand. And so, when he spoke of friendship and youth, the other men did not laugh. They were silent—some with assent, some with doubt, and some, possibly, with regret.

"I was second of one of their oldest boats for two years and Jack Evans was mate. Jack and I became friends. I don't mean that the Mate and the Second of that old ship went about with their arms wound round each other's necks. We were, on the contrary, very often at each other's throats, so to speak. Mates and second-engineers are professionally antagonistic. We had terrific altercations over stores, for the company patronized one of those old-fashioned ship chandlers who sent cabin, deck, and engine stores all in one chaotic heap. Jack would get my varnish and I would snaffle a couple of bolts of his canvas. But that would all blow away by tea time, when we'd go ashore and spend the evening together. Mind you, we were neither of us very good young men. We ... well, we had some good times and some bad ones. We were shifted together into another ship. Then Jack, who'd been nine solid years mate in the company and was getting so angry about it that the port-captain used to avoid him, Jack got a command. I shall never forget it. We were lying as peaceably as you please in the top corner of the old Queens Dock, Glasgow. It was Saturday night and all was snug for a quiet week-end. Jack and I were in his room under the bridge having a nip, when a telegraph-boy came clattering down the brass-edged staircase. Jack opened the wire, read it, and then gave me a thump on the back that nearly broke it. He was a stout, florid-faced, peppery little Welshman. What I liked about him was his crystal-clear character. What he thought came out like a shell out of a gun—with an explosion. 'The old thief's given me a ship at last!' he roared. And he had to pack and get away that night to Bristol. I went for a cab while he got his dunnage together. And I remember now, waiting on the platform at the Union Station for the train to move, with Jack in a corner of the compartment drunk as a lord, and snoring.

"It was in London I met him again.