ger said nothing more, but retreated quietly, and with short
strides, to the stem. From the fact that the sleeves of his pea-jacket
reached far below his wrists, it was clear that the garment had
originated from the shoulders of another man.

As for the boatswain, on noting the circumspection and diffidence with
which the passenger walked, he frowned, sucked at his beard, approached
a sailor who was engaged in vigorously scrubbing the brass on the door
of the captain's cabin with a naked palm, and said in an undertone:

"Did you happen to notice the gait of that little man there in the
light pea-jacket and dirty boots?"

"I did."

"Then see here. Do keep an eye upon him."

"But why? Is he a bad lot?"

"Something like it, I think."

"I will then."

At a table near the hatchway of the first-class cabin, a fat man in
grey was drinking beer. Already he had reached a state of moderate
fuddlement, for his eyes were protruding sightlessly and staring
unwinkingly at the opposite wall. Meanwhile, a number of flies were
swarming in the sticky puddles on the table, or else crawling over his
greyish beard and the brick-red skin of his motionless features.

The boatswain winked in his direction, and remarked:

"Half-seas over, HE is."

"'Tis his way," a pockmarked, eyebrow-less sailor responded.

Here the drunken man sneezed: with the result that a cloud of flies
were blown over the table. Looking at them, and sighing as his
companion had done, the boatswain thoughtfully observed:

"Why, he regularly sneezes flies, eh?"

* * * * *

The resting-place which I myself had selected was a stack of firewood
over the stokehole shoot; and as I lay upon it I could see the hills
gradually darkening the water with a mourning veil as calmly they
advanced to meet the steamer; while in the meadows, a last lingering
glow of the sunset's radiance was reddening the stems of the birches,
and making the newly mended roof of a hut look as though it were cased
in red fustian--communicating to everything else in the vicinity a
semblance of floating amid fire--and effacing all outline, and causing
the scene as a whole to dissolve into streaks of red and orange and
blue, save where, on a hill above the hut, a black grove of firs stood
thrown into tense, keen, and clear-cut relief.

Under a hill a party of fishermen had lit a wood fire, the flames of
which could be seen playing upon, and picking out, the white hu