grasp a pin in
its rail. The flood swept us, brawling round the gear, foundering the
hatch. For a moment I thought it was a case, and saw nothing but
maniacal water. Then the foam subsided to clear torrents which flung
about violently with the ship's movement. The men were in the rigging.
Yeo was rigid at the wheel, his eyes on the future. I could not see the
other passenger till his wife screamed, and then I saw him. Two figures
rolled in a flood that was pouring to the canting of the deck, and one
of them desperately clutched at the other for aid. But the other was
the dead skipper, washed from his place on the hatch.

We were over the bar again, and the deck became level. But it remained
the bottom of a shallow well in which floated with indifference the
one-time master of the _Judy_, face downwards, and who presently
stranded amidships. Our passenger reclined on the vacated hatch, his
eyes wide with childish and unspoken terror, and fixed on his wife,
whose ministering hands he fumbled for as does a child for his mother's
when he wakes at night after a dream of evil.

XII. The Lascar's Walking-Stick

The big face of Limehouse Church clock stared through the window at us.
It is rather a senseless face, because it is so full of cracks that you
can find any hour in it you do not want, especially when in a hurry.
But nobody with a life that had not wide areas of waste leisure in it
would ever visit Hammond now, where he lives in a tenement building, in
a room which overlooks the roofs and railway arches of Limehouse. Just
outside his window the tower of the church is rather too large and too
close.

Hammond has rooms in the tenement which are above the rest of the
street. He surmounts many layers of dense humanity. The house is not
the usual model dwelling. Once it knew better days. Once it was the
residence of a shipowner, in the days when the London docks were full
of clippers, and shipowners husbanded their own ships and liked to live
near their work. The house has a broad and noble staircase, having a
carved handrail as wide as a span; but much of the old and carved
interior woodwork of the house is missing--firewood sometimes runs
short there--and the rest is buried under years of paint and dirt.

Hammond never knows how many people share the house with him. "I've
tried to find out, but the next day one of 'em has died and two more
are born." It is such a hive that most of Hammond's friends gave up
vi