ropped on a wooden footstool. On the other
side of the deck Hermann and I would get a couple of chairs out of the
cabin and settle down to a smoking match, accompanied at long intervals
by the pacific exchange of a few words. I came nearly every evening.
Hermann I would find in his shirt sleeves. As soon as he returned from
the shore on board his ship he commenced operations by taking off his
coat; then he put on his head an embroidered round cap with a tassel,
and changed his boots for a pair of cloth slippers. Afterwards he smoked
at the cabin-door, looking at his children with an air of civic virtue,
till they got caught one after another and put to bed in various
staterooms. Lastly, we would drink some beer in the cabin, which
was furnished with a wooden table on cross legs, and with black
straight-backed chairs--more like a farm kitchen than a ship's cuddy.
The sea and all nautical affairs seemed very far removed from the
hospitality of this exemplary family.

And I liked this because I had a rather worrying time on board my own
ship. I had been appointed ex-officio by the British Consul to take
charge of her after a man who had died suddenly, leaving for the
guidance of his successor some suspiciously unreceipted bills, a few
dry-dock estimates hinting at bribery, and a quantity of vouchers for
three years' extravagant expenditure; all these mixed up together in a
dusty old violin-case lined with ruby velvet. I found besides a large
account-book, which, when opened, hopefully turned out to my infinite
consternation to be filled with verses--page after page of rhymed
doggerel of a jovial and improper character, written in the neatest
minute hand I ever did see. In the same fiddle-case a photograph of my
predecessor, taken lately in Saigon, represented in front of a garden
view, and in company of a female in strange draperies, an elderly,
squat, rugged man of stern aspect in a clumsy suit of black broadcloth,
and with the hair brushed forward above the temples in a manner
reminding one of a boar's tusks. Of a fiddle, however, the only trace
on board was the case, its empty husk as it were; but of the two last
freights the ship had indubitably earned of late, there were not even
the husks left. It was impossible to say where all that money had gone
to. It wasn't on board. It had not been remitted home; for a letter
from the owners, preserved in a desk evidently by the merest accident,
complained mildly enough that th