an officer of the freight packet greeted
him by name; a sailor piled his luggage on a barrow; and Neeland
walked through the vista of covered docks to the pier.

There was a lively wind whipping that notoriously bad-mannered streak
of water known as the English Channel. Possibly, had it been
christened the French Channel its manners might have been more polite.
But there was now nothing visible about it to justify its sentimental
pseudonym of Silver Streak.

It was a dirty colour, ominous of ill-temper beyond the great
breakwater to the northward; and it fretted and fumed inshore and made
white and ghastly faces from the open sea.

But Neeland, dining from a tray in a portholed pit consecrated to the
use of a casual supercargo, rejoiced because he adored the sea, inland
lubber that he had been born and where the tides of fate had stranded
him. For, to a New Yorker, the sea seems far away--as far as it seems
to the Parisian. And only when chance business takes him to the
Battery does a New Yorker realise the nearness of the ocean to that
vast volume of ceaseless dissonance called New York.

* * * * *

Neeland ate cold meat and bread and cheese, and washed it down with
bitters.

He was nearly asleep on his sofa when the packet cast off.

He was sound asleep when, somewhere in the raging darkness of the
Channel, he was hurled from the sofa against the bunk opposite--into
which he presently crawled and lay, still half asleep, mechanically
rubbing a maltreated shin.

Twice more the bad-mannered British Channel was violently rude to him;
each time he crawled back to stick like a limpet in the depths of his
bunk.

Except when the Channel was too discourteous, he slept as a sea bird
sleeps afloat, tossing outside thundering combers which batter basalt
rocks.

Even in his deep, refreshing sea sleep, the subtle sense of
exhilaration--of well-being--which contact with the sea always brought
to him, possessed him. And, deep within him, the drop of Irish seethed
and purred as a kettle purrs through the watches of the night over a
banked but steady fire.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE ROAD TO PARIS

Over the drenched sea wall gulls whirled and eddied above the spouting
spray; the grey breakwater was smothered under exploding combers;
_quai_, docks, white-washed lighthouse, swept with spindrift, appeared
and disappeared through the stormy obscurity as the tender from the
Channel