Left your
dunnage behind?"--"Yes, dunnage and money," answered Donkin, raising
his voice a little; "I got nothink. No clothes, no bed. A bandy-legged
little Hirish chap 'ere 'as give me a blanket. Think I'll go an' sleep
in the fore topmast staysail to-night."

He went on deck trailing behind his back a corner of the blanket.
Singleton, without a glance, moved slightly aside to let him pass. The
nigger put away his shore togs and sat in clean working clothes on his
box, one arm stretched over his knees. After staring at Singleton for
some time he asked without emphasis:--"What kind of ship is this? Pretty
fair? Eh?"

Singleton didn't stir. A long while after he said, with unmoved
face:--"Ship!... Ships are all right. It is the men in them!"

He went on smoking in the profound silence. The wisdom of half a century
spent in listening to the thunder of the waves had spoken unconsciously
through his old lips. The cat purred on the windlass. Then James Wait
had a fit of roaring, rattling cough, that shook him, tossed him like
a hurricane, and flung him panting with staring eyes headlong on his
sea-chest. Several men woke up. One said sleepily out of his bunk:
"'Struth! what a blamed row!"--"I have a cold on my chest," gasped
Wait.--"Cold! you call it," grumbled the man; "should think 'twas
something more...."--"Oh! you think so," said the nigger upright and
loftily scornful again. He climbed into his berth and began coughing
persistently while he put his head out to glare all round the
forecastle. There was no further protest. He fell back on the pillow,
and could be heard there wheezing regularly like a man oppressed in his
sleep.

Singleton stood at the door with his face to the light and his back to
the darkness. And alone in the dim emptiness of the sleeping forecastle
he appeared bigger, colossal, very old; old as Father Time himself,
who should have come there into this place as quiet as a sepulchre to
contemplate with patient eyes the short victory of sleep, the consoler.
Yet he was only a child of time, a lonely relic of a devoured and
forgotten generation. He stood, still strong, as ever unthinking; a
ready man with a vast empty past and with no future, with his childlike
impulses and his man's passions already dead within his tattooed breast.
The men who could understand his silence were gone--those men who knew
how to exist beyond the pale of life and within sight of eternity. They
had been strong, as those a