tinned pineapple and cake for tea. Fortified thus,
Bicker and Mead and myself go a-fishing on the opposite quay, where some
Argentines have been catching fine fish. Now it is, to the best of my
memory, the fact that I have never yet caught one fish on Sunday; and
so I should have been wiser than to have joined in this excursion. Luck
stopped dead as soon as we began, and to make things worse, through a
sleepy reply of Bicker's I imagined the line to be made fast to the jetty,
and threw out the sinker with special success "far out at sea." That line
was not made fast. It had belonged to the steward. He, when he heard
the disaster, stood in a kind of _rigor_, gazing at high heaven as one
insensible to misfortune.

And now came our last day at Ingeniero White. Not too soon, it seemed;
the scenery of the port having but little of freshness, and the drama
of loading again lacking in situations. Mosquitoes here served me well
by arousing me in the early morning, as I was instructed to take a
hand at six with tallying the bags of grain. I was there to the moment,
but my duty proved to be that of standing by, enjoying life. At twelve,
all hands were mustered amidships and numbered by the port authority,
and one was missing. At length it was found out who, namely, one Towsle
the sleepiest of the apprentices, and where--in his bath, dozing unaware
of the parade outside the door. The pilot came aboard at three, and the
tug _Lydia_ presented herself to guide the _Bonadventure_ out: there was
much business with ropes fore and aft, and the ship swinging round was
free of the wharf about the top of the tide. The warehouses with their
stacks of bags, slippered blue-trousered handymen, surpliced overseers
with their sampling hollow bayonets, railway trucks and capstans,
ubiquitous dogs and all, began to recede. But we had not come more than a
couple of miles from the elevators, nor out of sight of the refugee-like
town behind them, when we anchored to await Hosea. At a considerable
space from the town, all alone, we saw as we waited the big drab square
building euphemistically known aboard as the "variety show." It was a
sad sight, and to me in its significance of some people's luck in this
world, a challenge to my random cheerful philosophy, which I have not yet
been able entirely to dismiss.

Presently from the land a storm began to foreshadow itself, and suddenly
there was a burst of wild piping wind, like a spiteful cry, that flung