s of the German empire, and soaking
himself in beer all day long and day after day in De Jongh's back-shop,
till De Jongh, who charged a guilder for every bottle without as much
as the quiver of an eyelid, would beckon me aside, and, with his little
leathery face all puckered up, declare confidentially, "Business is
business, but this man, captain, he make me very sick. Tfui!"

'I was looking at him from the shade. He was hurrying on a little in
advance, and the sunlight beating on him brought out his bulk in a
startling way. He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking
on hind-legs. He was extravagantly gorgeous too--got up in a soiled
sleeping-suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a
pair of ragged straw slippers on his bare feet, and somebody's cast-off
pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up with a
manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head. You understand a man like
that hasn't the ghost of a chance when it comes to borrowing clothes.
Very well. On he came in hot haste, without a look right or left, passed
within three feet of me, and in the innocence of his heart went on
pelting upstairs into the harbour office to make his deposition, or
report, or whatever you like to call it.

'It appears he addressed himself in the first instance to the principal
shipping-master. Archie Ruthvel had just come in, and, as his story
goes, was about to begin his arduous day by giving a dressing-down to
his chief clerk. Some of you might have known him--an obliging little
Portuguese half-caste with a miserably skinny neck, and always on the
hop to get something from the shipmasters in the way of eatables--a
piece of salt pork, a bag of biscuits, a few potatoes, or what not. One
voyage, I recollect, I tipped him a live sheep out of the remnant of my
sea-stock: not that I wanted him to do anything for me--he couldn't,
you know--but because his childlike belief in the sacred right to
perquisites quite touched my heart. It was so strong as to be almost
beautiful. The race--the two races rather--and the climate . . .
However, never mind. I know where I have a friend for life.

'Well, Ruthvel says he was giving him a severe lecture--on official
morality, I suppose--when he heard a kind of subdued commotion at his
back, and turning his head he saw, in his own words, something round and
enormous, resembling a sixteen-hundred-weight sugar-hogshead wrapped in
striped flannelette, up-ended in