ave stepped over without a second contemptuous
glance,

He took his ship away. The affair was not discussed at home, though
each of us gave it some private despondency. We followed him silently,
apprehensively, through the reports in the _Shipping Gazette_. He made
point after point safely--St. Vincent, Gibraltar, Suez, Aden--after him
we went across to Colombo, Singapore, and at length we learned that he
was safe at Batavia. He had got that steamer out all right. He got
her home again, too. After his first adventure as master he made
voyage after voyage with no more excitement in them than you would find
in Sunday walks in a suburb. It was plain luck; or else navigation and
seamanship were greatly overrated arts.

A day came when he invited me to go with him part of his voyage. I
could leave the ship at Bordeaux. I went. You must remember that we
had never seen his ship. And there he was, walking with me to the dock
from a Welsh railway station, a man in a cheap mackintosh, with an
umbrella I will not describe, and he was carrying a brown paper parcel.
He was appropriately crowned with a bowler hat several sizes too small
for him. Glancing up at his profile, I actually wondered whether the
turmoil was now going on in his mind over that confession which now he
was bound to make; that he was not the master of a ship, and never had
been.

There she was, a bulky modern freighter, full of derricks and
time-saving appliances, and her funnel lording it over the
neighbourhood. The man with the parcel under his arm led me up the
gangway. I was not yet convinced. I was, indeed, less sure than ever
that he could be the master of this huge community of engines and men.
He did not accord with it.

We were no sooner on deck than a man in uniform, grey-haired, with a
seamed and resolute face, which any one would have recognized at once
as a sailor's, approached us. He was introduced as the chief officer.
He had a tale of woe: trouble with the dockmaster, with the stevedores,
with the cargo, with many things. He did not appear to know what to do
with them. He was asking this boy of ours.

The skipper began to speak. At that moment I was gazing at the funnel,
trying to decipher a monogram upon it; but I heard a new voice, rapid
and incisive, sure of its subject, resolving doubts, and making the
crooked straight. It was the man with the brown paper parcel. That
was still under his arm--in fact, the parcel cont