he must
have heard us. When I came up to take my watch, he steps out of the
chart-room and has a good look all round, peeps over at the sidelights,
glances at the compass, squints upward at the stars. That's his regular
performance. By-and-by he says: 'Was that you talking just now in the
port alleyway?' 'Yes, sir.' 'With the third engineer?' 'Yes, sir.' He
walks off to starboard, and sits under the dodger on a little campstool
of his, and for half an hour perhaps he makes no sound, except that I
heard him sneeze once. Then after a while I hear him getting up over
there, and he strolls across to port, where I was. 'I can't understand
what you can find to talk about,' says he. 'Two solid hours. I am not
blaming you. I see people ashore at it all day long, and then in the
evening they sit down and keep at it over the drinks. Must be saying the
same things over and over again. I can't understand.'

"Did you ever hear anything like that? And he was so patient about it.
It made me quite sorry for him. But he is exasperating, too, sometimes.
Of course one would not do anything to vex him even if it were worth
while. But it isn't. He's so jolly innocent that if you were to put your
thumb to your nose and wave your fingers at him he would only wonder
gravely to himself what got into you. He told me once quite simply that
he found it very difficult to make out what made people always act so
queerly. He's too dense to trouble about, and that's the truth."

Thus wrote Mr. Jukes to his chum in the Western ocean trade, out of the
fulness of his heart and the liveliness of his fancy.

He had expressed his honest opinion. It was not worthwhile trying to
impress a man of that sort. If the world had been full of such men, life
would have probably appeared to Jukes an unentertaining and unprofitable
business. He was not alone in his opinion. The sea itself, as if sharing
Mr. Jukes' good-natured forbearance, had never put itself out to startle
the silent man, who seldom looked up, and wandered innocently over
the waters with the only visible purpose of getting food, raiment,
and house-room for three people ashore. Dirty weather he had known, of
course. He had been made wet, uncomfortable, tired in the usual way,
felt at the time and presently forgotten. So that upon the whole he had
been justified in reporting fine weather at home. But he had never been
given a glimpse of immeasurable strength and of immoderate wrath, the
wrath that pa