entry paced day and night.

The after-cabin was lit by a skylight overhead and scuttles in the
ship's side. The sunlight, streaming in through the starboard ones,
winked on the butterfly clamps of burnished brass and small rods from
which the little chintz curtains hung. A roll-topped desk occupied a
corner near the fireplace, and round the bulkheads, affixed to white
enamelled battens, hung water-colour paintings of his ships. A sloop
of war under full sail; a brig, close-hauled, beating out of Plymouth
Sound; a tiny gunboat at anchor in a backwater of the Upper Yangtse.
There were spick-and-span cruisers; a quaint, top-heavy looking
battleship that in her day had been considered the last word in naval
construction, and whose name to-day provokes reminiscences from the
older generation and from the younger half-dubious smiles; then, near
the door, came modern men-of-war of familiar aspect. They represented
the milestones of a long career.

A chart lay folded on a table in the centre of the cabin, with a pair
of dividers and a parallel ruler lying on it. Another table stood in a
corner near the door--a small, glass-topped table such as collectors of
curios gather their treasures in. The contents of this table, however,
were not curios in the strict sense of the word. A number of them were
very commonplace objects, but each one held its particular associations.

You will find just such a collection of insignificant mysteries in a
boy's pocket or a jackdaw's nest. Bits of string, a marble polished by
friction, a piece of coloured glass, an old nail--in themselves
rubbish, but doubtless linking the possessor to some amiable memory,
and cherished for no better reason.

Some men retain this instinct of boyhood. But whereas the boy is
secretive and reticent about the particular associations his pocket
holds, the man will talk about his hoard.

In the glass-topped table in that corner of the after-cabin were ties
with all the seven seas and the shores they wash. Mementoes of folly
or friendship, sport or achievement; fragments of the mosaic that is
life.

A bit of brick from the Great Wall of China recalled a bag of geese in
the clear cold dusk of Northern Asia. Memories, too, of the whaler's
beat back to the fleet in the teeth of a rising gale that swept in from
the Pacific, when the bravest unlaced his boots and they baled with the
empty guncase.

There was a piece of the sacred pavement of Mecca, brought