t."

The harbour-master's boy was speedy, and the harbour-master himself
piloted us out into the wide gulf of the river's mouth. The
beer-coloured stream gave up its scent of crushed marigolds strongly
enough to pierce through the smells of the ship and the smells of the
crowded chattering negroes on the fore-deck, and the old steamer began
to groan and creak as she lifted to the South Atlantic swell. The sun
went down, and night followed like the turning out of a lamp. The
lighthouse flickered out on the Portuguese shore away on the port bow,
and above it hung the Southern Cross, a pale faint thing, shaped like an
ill-made kite.

[Footnote 1: Copyrighted in the U.S.A. by Cutcliffe Hyne, 1898.]

[Illustration: "CAME DOWN OFF THE UPPER BRIDGE."]

The bumping engines stopped, and the Dane came down off the upper
bridge. He stood with me for a minute on the brown, greasy deck planks,
and then went down the ladder into his boat.

"Oscar-strasse, tretten, Kjobnhavn!" he shouted, as the gig dropped
astern. "Mind you come. I shall be home in another nine months."

"Wanderers' Club, London; don't forget; sorry I haven't a card left," I
hailed back, and wondered in my mind whether in any of the world's
turnings I should ever meet that good fellow again. But the steamer was
once more under way, mumbling and complaining, and the store-keeper at
that moment was beginning to open the case of dried fish--baccalhao, as
they call it on the coast--to which we traced back the hideous plague
which in the next few days swept away her people like the fire from a
battery of guns.

There were only two other passengers beside the bishop and myself--a
pair of yellow-faced, yellow-fingered Portuguese from down the coast,
traders both, with livers like Strasbourg geese. The Skipper was a
decent, weak little chap from Lisbon, who might have been good-looking
if he had sometimes washed; the Chief Engineer was a Swede, who spoke
English and quoted Ibsen; and the other officers I never came specially
across. There was only one of my own countrymen on board, a fireman from
Hull, one of the strongest men I ever met, and certainly the most
truculent ruffian. His name was Tordoff on the ship's books, but that
was a "purser's name." He spoke pure English when he forgot himself, and
certainly had once been a gentleman.

[Illustration: "LIFTED THE BODY AS THOUGH IT HAD BEEN RED-HOT."]

It was baking hot down below, and the place was alive with rat