thing in my
appearance. His old thin hands loosely clasped resting on his crossed
legs, he began by an elementary question in a mild voice, and went on,
went on. . . . It lasted for hours, for hours. Had I been a strange
microbe with potentialities of deadly mischief to the Merchant Service I
could not have been submitted to a more microscopic examination. Greatly
reassured by his apparent benevolence, I had been at first very alert in
my answers. But at length the feeling of my brain getting addled crept
upon me. And still the passionless process went on, with a sense of
untold ages having been spent already on mere preliminaries. Then I got
frightened. I was not frightened of being plucked; that eventuality did
not even present itself to my mind. It was something much more serious,
and weird. "This ancient person," I said to myself, terrified, "is so
near his grave that he must have lost all notion of time. He is
considering this examination in terms of eternity. It is all very well
for him. His race is run. But I may find myself coming out of this room
into the world of men a stranger, friendless, forgotten by my very
landlady, even were I able after this endless experience to remember the
way to my hired home." This statement is not so much of a verbal
exaggeration as may be supposed. Some very queer thoughts passed through
my head while I was considering my answers; thoughts which had nothing
to do with seamanship, nor yet with anything reasonable known to this
earth. I verily believe that at times I was lightheaded in a sort of
languid way. At last there fell a silence, and that, too, seemed to last
for ages, while, bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my
pass-slip slowly with a noiseless pen. He extended the scrap of paper
to me without a word, inclined his white head gravely to my parting
bow. . . .

When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed lemon,
and the door-keeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to get my hat and
tip him a shilling, said:

"Well! I thought you were never coming out."

"How long have I been in there?" I asked faintly.

He pulled out his watch.

"He kept you, sir, just under three hours. I don't think this ever
happened with any of the gentlemen before."

It was only when I got out of the building that I began to walk on
air. And the human animal being averse from change and timid before the
unknown, I said to myself that I would not mind really being ex