out on the floor.

There were over thirty men in the place; they had been celebrating the
coming of Christmas; and three of them pushed each other out of the way
in their eagerness to pour very bad brandy between Guido's teeth.
"Chuckey" Martin felt a sense of proprietorship in Guido, by the right
of discovery, and resented this, pushing them away, and protesting that
the thing to do was to rub his feet with snow.

A fat oily chief engineer of an Italian tramp steamer dropped on his
knees beside Guido and beat the boy's hands, and with unsteady fingers
tore open his scarf and jacket, and as he did this the figure of the
plaster Virgin with her hands stretched out looked up at him from its
bed on Guido's chest.

Some of the sailors drew their hands quickly across their breasts, and
others swore in some alarm, and the bar-keeper drank the glass of
whiskey he had brought for Guido at a gulp, and then readjusted his
apron to show that nothing had disturbed his equanimity. Guido sat up,
with his head against the chief engineer's knees, and opened his eyes,
and his ears were greeted with words in his own tongue. They gave him
hot coffee and hot soup and more brandy, and he told his story in a
burst of words that flowed like a torrent of tears--how he had been
stolen from his home at Genoa, where he used to watch the boats from the
stone pier in front of the custom-house, at which the sailors nodded,
and how the padrone, who was not his uncle, finding he could not black
boots nor sell papers, had given him these plaster casts to sell, and
how he had whipped him when people would not buy them, and how at last
he had tripped, and broken them all except this one hidden in his
breast, and how he had gone to sleep, and he asked now why had they
wakened him, for he had no place to go.

Guido remembered telling them this, and following them by their
gestures as they retold it to the others in a strange language, and then
the lights began to spin, and the faces grew distant, and he reached out
his hand for the fat chief engineer, and felt his arms tightening around
him.

A cold wind woke Guido, and the sound of something throbbing and beating
like a great clock. He was very warm and tired and lazy, and when he
raised his head he touched the ceiling close above him, and when he
opened his eyes he found himself in a little room with a square table
covered with oil-cloth in the centre, and rows of beds like shelves
around the wall