But not a bit of it. When I presented my self to be examined for master
the examiner who received me was short, plump, with a round, soft face
in gray, fluffy whiskers, and fresh, loquacious lips.

He commenced operations with an easy going "Let's see. H'm. Suppose you
tell me all you know of charter-parties." He kept it up in that style
all through, wandering off in the shape of comment into bits out of his
own life, then pulling himself up short and returning to the business in
hand. It was very interesting. "What's your idea of a jury-rudder now?"
he queried, suddenly, at the end of an instructive anecdote bearing upon
a point of stowage.

I warned him that I had no experience of a lost rudder at sea, and gave
him two classical examples of makeshifts out of a text-book. In exchange
he described to me a jury-rudder he had invented himself years before,
when in command of a three-thousand-ton steamer. It was, I declare, the
cleverest contrivance imaginable. "May be of use to you some day,"
he concluded. "You will go into steam presently. Everybody goes into
steam."

There he was wrong. I never went into steam--not really. If I only live
long enough I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead barbarism, a sort
of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman of the dark ages who had never
gone into steam--not really.

Before the examination was over he imparted to me a few interesting
details of the transport service in the time of the Crimean War.

"The use of wire rigging became general about that time, too," he
observed. "I was a very young master then. That was before you were
born."

"Yes, sir. I am of the year of 1857."

"The Mutiny year," he commented, as if to himself, adding in a louder
tone that his ship happened then to be in the Gulf of Bengal, employed
under a government charter.

Clearly the transport service had been the making of this examiner, who
so unexpectedly had given me an insight into his existence, awakening in
me the sense of the continuity of that sea life into which I had stepped
from outside; giving a touch of human intimacy to the machinery of
official relations. I felt adopted. His experience was for me, too, as
though he had been an ancestor.

Writing my long name (it has twelve letters) with laborious care on the
slip of blue paper, he remarked:

"You are of Polish extraction."

"Born there, sir."

He laid down the pen and leaned back to look at me as it were for the
first time.