, he had
neither craft of mind nor hand. Mr. Dainopoulos got him small situations
from time to time, and in between these he hung about, running errands,
and keeping shop, a pale, dwarfed, ragged creature, with emaciated
features and brilliant pathetic eyes. He was wearing a pair of woman's
boots, much too large for him, burst at the sides and with heels
dreadfully run over, so that he kept twitching himself erect. Mr.
Dainopoulos waved a hand towards this young paragon.

"See if you can find him a job on the _Kalkis_," he said. "Very honest
young feller." They spoke rapidly to each other and Mr. Dainopoulos gave
an amused grunt.

"He say he don't want to go in a ship. Scared she go down," he remarked.

The boy looked down the street with an expression of suppressed grief on
his face. He rolled his eyes towards his benefactor, imploring mercy.
Mr. Dainopoulos spoke to him again.

"He'll go," he said to Mr. Spokesly. "Fix him to help the cook. And if
you want anybody to take a letter, he's a very honest young feller."

The very honest young feller shrank away to one side, evidently feeling
no irresistible vocation for the sea. Indeed, he resembled one condemned
to die. He and his kind swarm in the ports of the Levant, the Semitic
parasites of sea-borne commerce, yet rarely setting foot upon a ship. He
drooped, as though his limbs had liquefied and he was about to collapse.
Mr. Dainopoulos, however, to whom ethnic distinctions of such refinement
were of no interest, ignored him and permitted him to revel in his agony
at a near-by cafe table.

"You come to my house to-night," he said to Mr. Spokesly. "I got one or
two little things to fix."

"Me too," said his new chief officer, who suddenly felt he needed
urgently to meet his own kind again. Mr. Dainopoulos was all right of
course, but Mr. Spokesly still retained the illusion that Anglo-Saxon
superiority was accepted by the world like gravity and the other laws of
nature. It would not do to make himself too cheap, he reflected. He had
an unpleasant feeling that his late captain on the _Tanganyika_ would
have stared if he had seen his chief officer hobnobbing with a
money-changer and a Jewish youth of almost inconceivable honesty and
destitution. Mr. Spokesly's wit, however, was nimble enough now to see
that Captain Meredith himself had not always been a quiet, refined, and
competent commander; and moreover, Captain Meredith might quite
conceivably have seen and ta