an can't figure
on remembering all the folk he meets in a while like that."

The Swede shook his head.

"You know how one sometimes has the feeling that a place one has never
been to before is strangely familiar. That's how I seem to see you." He
gave a whimsical smile. "Perhaps I knew you in some past existence.
Perhaps, perhaps you were the master of a galley in ancient Rome and I
was a slave at the oar. Thirty years have you been here?"

"Every bit of thirty years."

"I wonder if you knew a man called Red?"

"Red?"

"That is the only name I've ever known him by. I never knew him
personally. I never even set eyes on him. And yet I seem to see him more
clearly than many men, my brothers, for instance, with whom I passed my
daily life for many years. He lives in my imagination with the
distinctness of a Paolo Malatesta or a Romeo. But I daresay you have
never read Dante or Shakespeare?"

"I can't say as I have," said the captain.

Neilson, smoking a cigar, leaned back in his chair and looked vacantly
at the ring of smoke which floated in the still air. A smile played on
his lips, but his eyes were grave. Then he looked at the captain. There
was in his gross obesity something extraordinarily repellent. He had the
plethoric self-satisfaction of the very fat. It was an outrage. It set
Neilson's nerves on edge. But the contrast between the man before him
and the man he had in mind was pleasant.

"It appears that Red was the most comely thing you ever saw. I've talked
to quite a number of people who knew him in those days, white men, and
they all agree that the first time you saw him his beauty just took your
breath away. They called him Red on account of his flaming hair. It had
a natural wave and he wore it long. It must have been of that wonderful
colour that the pre-Raphaelites raved over. I don't think he was vain of
it, he was much too ingenuous for that, but no one could have blamed him
if he had been. He was tall, six feet and an inch or two--in the native
house that used to stand here was the mark of his height cut with a
knife on the central trunk that supported the roof--and he was made like
a Greek god, broad in the shoulders and thin in the flanks; he was like
Apollo, with just that soft roundness which Praxiteles gave him, and
that suave, feminine grace which has in it something troubling and
mysterious. His skin was dazzling white, milky, like satin; his skin was
like a woman's."

"I had kind of a