p. Perhaps a shoal of young porpoises bobbing along portended a
slight squall, its approach yielding those ever remarkable lights
that mark broken rain, lily-of-the-valley green, and on the waters a
silver glitter, while a shadow drooped over all. The third mate's
drying-ground was speedily cleared at these times.

Mead's watch occupied the four hours before noon, and the four before
midnight. At noon he would join with Bicker in "Shooting old Sol," a
process which, with its turning-up of pages packed with figures, reminded
me of old trouble in a famous mathematical school of severe traditions,
where hung on the walls a symbolic picture--a youth swimming for dear
life from a gigantic shark. In the evening I would find Mead on the
bridge, uttering to himself as likely as not his talismanic motto: _Quo
Fata Vocant_. He was a rover; from China he had gone to Australia to join
the Army in 1914; thence had seen Gallipoli, Egypt, and, I believe,
Palestine; went into the Navy with a commission after that; and now had
returned to the life in which he had been apprenticed a dozen years
before. As these evening colloquies with Mead became a rule with me,
and as it was Mead whom I came to know better than anyone else, other
matters relating to him will be found in their places.

There was no lack of good spirits aboard. Reminiscences of a humorous
tinge came up in almost every conversation; and conversation was an
earnest and frequent affair. Indeed, there was observable a certain
rivalry (as with those who supply the fashionable memoirs of the past
twenty or thirty years), who should remember the most: and each speaker
showed a vigorous faith in his own tale, which he scarcely extended
to his predecessor's. The mate, the clear-headed Meacock, with his
blunt serenity--embodying qualities in which I could not help seeing
the English seaman of the centuries--was eloquent one evening about
examiners. Examinations lie thick in the navigator's early way. He
recalled one well-known figure of these inquisitions, who, at a time
when no dinner interval was allowed to the candidates, used to bring out
frying-pan, steak and the rest, and tantalize every one by cooking himself
his dinner. (I wondered if this suggestion might be passed on to the
Universities.) Another original, Meacock went on, warming himself with the
recollection, had a preference for ordinary, that is seafaring, words.

_Examiner._ If I carry this barometer up a mountain,