ing after it, Captain Giles? Here you have got me a command and
saved the Steward's life in one afternoon. Though why you should have
taken all that interest in either of us is more than I can understand."

Captain Giles remained silent for a minute. Then gravely:

"He's not a bad steward really. He can find a good cook, at any rate.
And, what's more, he can keep him when found. I remember the cooks we
had here before his time! . . ."

I must have made a movement of impatience, because he interrupted
himself with an apology for keeping me yarning there, while no doubt I
needed all my time to get ready.

What I really needed was to be alone for a bit. I seized this opening
hastily. My bedroom was a quiet refuge in an apparently uninhabited wing
of the building. Having absolutely nothing to do (for I had not unpacked
my things), I sat down on the bed and abandoned myself to the influences
of the hour. To the unexpected influences. . . .

And first I wondered at my state of mind. Why was I not more surprised?
Why? Here I was, invested with a command in the twinkling of an eye, not
in the common course of human affairs, but more as if by enchantment. I
ought to have been lost in astonishment. But I wasn't. I was very much
like people in fairy tales. Nothing ever astonishes them. When a fully
appointed gala coach is produced out of a pumpkin to take her to a ball,
Cinderella does not exclaim. She gets in quietly and drives away to her
high fortune.

Captain Ellis (a fierce sort of fairy) had produced a command out of a
drawer almost as unexpectedly as in a fairy tale. But a command is an
abstract idea, and it seemed a sort of "lesser marvel" till it flashed
upon me that it involved the concrete existence of a ship.

A ship! My ship! She was mine, more absolutely mine for possession
and care than anything in the world; an object of responsibility and
devotion. She was there waiting for me, spell-bound, unable to move,
to live, to get out into the world (till I came), like an enchanted
princess. Her call had come to me as if from the clouds. I had never
suspected her existence. I didn't know how she looked, I had barely
heard her name, and yet we were indissolubly united for a certain
portion of our future, to sink or swim together!

A sudden passion of anxious impatience rushed through my veins, gave me
such a sense of the intensity of existence as I have never felt before
or since. I discovered how much of a seaman I