y humbug Schomberg was. The
"boy" might have been forty or a hundred and forty for all you could
tell--one of those Chinamen of the death's-head type of face and
completely inscrutable. Before the end of the third day he had revealed
himself as a confirmed opium-smoker, a gambler, a most audacious thief,
and a first-class sprinter. When he departed at the top of his speed
with thirty-two golden sovereigns of my own hard-earned savings it was
the last straw. I had reserved that money in case my difficulties came
to the worst. Now it was gone I felt as poor and naked as a fakir. I
clung to my ship, for all the bother she caused me, but what I could not
bear were the long lonely evenings in her cuddy, where the atmosphere,
made smelly by a leaky lamp, was agitated by the snoring of the mate.
That fellow shut himself up in his stuffy cabin punctually at eight, and
made gross and revolting noises like a water-logged trump. It was odious
not to be able to worry oneself in comfort on board one's own ship.
Everything in this world, I reflected, even the command of a nice little
barque, may be made a delusion and a snare for the unwary spirit of
pride in man.

From such reflections I was glad to make any escape on board that Bremen
Diana. There apparently no whisper of the world's iniquities had ever
penetrated. And yet she lived upon the wide sea: and the sea tragic
and comic, the sea with its horrors and its peculiar scandals, the sea
peopled by men and ruled by iron necessity is indubitably a part of the
world. But that patriarchal old tub, like some saintly retreat, echoed
nothing of it. She was world proof. Her venerable innocence apparently
had put a restraint on the roaring lusts of the sea. And yet I have
known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An
elemental force is ruthlessly frank. It may, of course, have been
Hermann's skilful seamanship, but to me it looked as if the allied
oceans had refrained from smashing these high bulwarks, unshipping
the lumpy rudder, frightening the children, and generally opening this
family's eyes out of sheer reticence. It looked like reticence. The
ruthless disclosure was in the end left for a man to make; a man strong
and elemental enough and driven to unveil some secrets of the sea by the
power of a simple and elemental desire.

This, however, occurred much later, and meantime I took sanctuary in
that serene old ship early every evening. The only person on board th