hcroft turned to go.

"I'll see you again, Knowles," he said, "and give you the hotel street
and number and all that. Hope you'll like it. If you shouldn't the
Langham is not bad--quiet and old-fashioned, but really very fair.
And if you care for something more public and--Ah--American, there are
always the Savoy and the Cecil. Here is my card. If I can be of any
service to you while you are in town drop me a line at my clubs, either
of them. I must be toddling. By, by."

He "toddled" and I sought my room to prepare for luncheon.

Two days more and our voyage was at an end. We saw more of our friend
the captain during those days and of Heathcroft as well. The former
fulfilled his promise of showing us through the ship, and Hephzy and I,
descending greasy iron stairways and twisting through narrow passages,
saw great rooms full of mighty machinery, and a cavern where perspiring,
grimy men, looking but half-human in the red light from the furnace
mouths, toiled ceaselessly with pokers and shovels.

We stood at the forward end of the promenade deck at night, looking out
into the blackness, and heard the clang of four bells from the shadows
at the bow, the answering clang from the crow's-nest on the foremast,
and the weird cry of "All's well" from the lookouts. This experience
made a great impression on us both. Hephzy expressed my feeling exactly
when she said in a hushed whisper:

"There, Hosy! for the first time I feel as if I really was on board a
ship at sea. My father and your father and all our men-folks for ever
so far back have heard that 'All's well'--yes, and called it, too,
when they first went as sailors. Just think of it! Why Father was only
sixteen when he shipped; just a boy, that's all. I've heard him say
'All's well' over and over again; 'twas a kind of byword with him. This
whole thing seems like somethin' callin' to me out of the past and gone.
Don't you feel it?"

I felt it, as she did. The black night, the quiet, the loneliness, the
salt spray on our faces and the wash of the waves alongside, the high
singsong wail from lookout to lookout--it WAS a voice from the past, the
call of generations of sea-beaten, weather-worn, brave old Cape Codders
to their descendants, reminding the latter of a dead and gone profession
and of thousands of fine, old ships which had plowed the ocean in the
days when "Plutonias" were unknown.

We attended the concert in the Lounge, and the ball on the promenade
deck w