ia) who was the first reader of "Almayer's
Folly"--the very first reader I ever had. "Would it bore you very much
reading a MS. in a handwriting like mine?" I asked him one evening on
a sudden impulse at the end of a longish conversation whose subject was
Gibbon's History. Jacques (that was his name) was sitting in my cabin
one stormy dog-watch below, after bringing me a book to read from his
own travelling store.

"Not at all," he answered with his courteous intonation and a faint
smile. As I pulled a drawer open his suddenly aroused curiosity gave him
a watchful expression. I wonder what he expected to see. A poem, maybe.
All that's beyond guessing now. He was not a cold but a calm man, still
more subdued by disease--a man of few words and of an unassuming modesty
in general intercourse, but with something uncommon in the whole of his
person which set him apart from the undistinguished lot of our sixty
passengers. His eyes had a thoughtful introspective look. In his
attractive reserved manner, and in a veiled sympathetic voice he asked:

"What is this?" "It is a sort of tale," I answered with an effort. "It
is not even finished yet. Nevertheless I would like to know what you
think of it." He put the MS. in the breast-pocket of his jacket; I
remember perfectly his thin brown fingers folding it lengthwise. "I
will read it tomorrow," he remarked, seizing the door-handle, and then,
watching the roll of the ship for a propitious moment, he opened the
door and was gone. In the moment of his exit I heard the sustained
booming of the wind, the swish of the water on the decks of the Torrens,
and the subdued, as if distant, roar of the rising sea. I noted the
growing disquiet in the great restlessness of the ocean, and responded
professionally to it with the thought that at eight o'clock, in another
half-hour or so at the furthest, the top-gallant sails would have to
come off the ship.

Next day, but this time in the first dog-watch, Jacques entered my
cabin. He had a thick, woollen muffler round his throat and the MS. was
in his hand. He tendered it to me with a steady look but without a word.
I took it in silence. He sat down on the couch and still said nothing.
I opened and shut a drawer under my desk, on which a filled-up log-slate
lay wide open in its wooden frame waiting to be copied neatly into the
sort of book I was accustomed to write with care, the ship's log-book. I
turned my back squarely on the desk. And even the