will own, Roddy,
that if fools had only kept their noses out of _my_ job in life, I
shouldn't be having to tell you this story.

"Anyhow, Macnaughten--that was the skipper's name--took all the
ship's instruments with him on board his own boat, which was the last
to quit.

"He was a good man, and I couldn't but admire his behaviour, first
and last. The _Eurotas_ went down within half an hour of the first
explosion; which had surprised us passengers on deck as we were
chatting and watching the sunset. The sea was calm as a pond, with a
bank of cloud to northward, all edged with gold on its western
fringes.

"I think this calm, resting over sea and sky, may have helped us
through the catastrophe. The only irritation I felt was at the
slowness of it all, between the moment we knew we were lost and
the moment when the vessel went down. Yet every moment between
was used to a nicety, almost as if Captain Macnaughten had been
preparing for the test. He commanded us, crew and passengers alike.
Four stokers had been killed below: another and the engineer officer
badly hurt. These two were fetched up while some of us lowered the
accommodation-ladder and others swung out the boats on the davits.
These two sick men were carried down to the first of the three boats
launched. Four women passengers followed; three married, one a
spinster. The three husbands were ordered down after them.

"The _Eurotas_, as I've told you, was a new ship, well found to the
last life-buoy. The directors of the Company had lunched on board
before she sailed and drunk to her health, having seen that
everything answered to advertisement. The boats were staunch, newly
painted and smart: the crew as well-picked a lot as the Board could
find. So far as I can recall those hurrying minutes, I remember them
as being almost intolerably slow. I cannot say how many of them it
took before we realised for a certainty that the ship was going down.
But I know that as, by order, I went down the ladder to the second
boat, I had a sense of irritation at the long time it was taking and
the methodical way the skipper was getting out stores and
water-breakers and having them hefted down.

"Another thing I must tell you. As I went down the ladder--the
ship's bows already beginning to dip steeply--I had a sense of being
in no _time_ at all, but in eternity. There around us, spread and
placid, stretched the emptiest waste of the Pacific, with God's sun
dese