ar he's
sailing with you. He's your Chief. You'd better know him."

Purdy raised his eyes in a grave and momentary survey, made to shake
hands with Hanson, but hesitated, and did so only because Hanson put out
his own great fist with decision. Purdy did not speak, except to say to
Hanson: "We're signing-on tomorrow. I'll meet you at the shipping office
then." He seemed to forget the pair of them, paused, and went to a far
vacant corner of the bar. The barmaid, as he got there, returned, and
stopped to say something to him.

"Well, I'm damned," muttered Macandrew. "Look here, Jessie," he cried,
"here's all us young men been waiting for nearly twenty minutes, and you
take no notice of us, but as soon as a captain looks across the counter,
there you are. But how did you know he was a captain? That's what I'd
like to know. He's only wearing a bowler hat."

2

The _Medea_ had been ordered unexpectedly to Barry for loading, to take
the place of an unready sister-ship; and Macandrew, of whom I have had
much experience, would be active, critical of what a dog must put up with
in life, and altogether unfit for intimate, amiable, and reminiscent
conversation. Yet I wanted to see him again before he left, and went
past the Board of Trade Office hoping for signs of the _Medea_, for I had
heard she was assembling a crew that morning. But the marine-store
shops, with their tarpaulin suits hanging outside open-armed and
oscillating, looked across to the men lounging against the
shipping-office railings, and the idlers stared across at the tarpaulins.
It did not appear to be a place where anything was destined to happen.
It merely looked like rain.

Macandrew might be inside with his crowd of firemen and greasers. Behind
the brass grille there a clerk, solitary and absorbed in his duties, bent
over a pile of ships' articles, and presented to the seamen in the public
space beyond him only the featureless shine of a bald head. The seamen,
scattered about in groups, shabby and listless, with a few of their
officers among them, were as sombre and subdued as though they had
learned life had nothing more to offer them, and they were present only
because they might as well use up the salvage of their days. The clerk
raised his head and questioned the men before him with a quick, inclusive
glance. "Any men here of the _Cygnet_?" he demanded. His voice, raised
in certainty above the casual murmuring of the repressed, mad