h of the time with the officers, and
even the crew, over whom he seemed to exercise a singular power,
and with whom he exhibited an odd freemasonry. To Randolph's eyes he
appeared to grow in strength and stature in the salt breath of the sea,
and although he was uniformly kind, even affectionate, to him, he was
brusque to the other passengers, and at times even with his friends the
sailors. Randolph sometimes wondered how he would treat a crew of his
own. He found some answer to that question in the captain's manner to
Jack Redhill, the abstractor of the portmanteau, and his old shipmate,
who was accompanying the captain in some dependent capacity, but who
received his master's confidences and orders with respectful devotion.

It was a cold, foggy morning, nearly two months later, that they landed
at Plymouth. The English coast had been a vague blank all night, only
pierced, long hours apart, by dim star-points or weird yellow beacon
flashes against the horizon. And this vagueness and unreality increased
on landing, until it seemed to Randolph that they had slipped into a
land of dreams. The illusion was kept up as they walked in the weird
shadows through half-lit streets into a murky railway station throbbing
with steam and sudden angry flashes in the darkness, and then drew away
into what ought to have been the open country, but was only gray plains
of mist against a lost horizon. Sometimes even the vague outlook was
obliterated by passing trains coming from nowhere and slipping into
nothingness. As they crept along with the day, without, however, any
lightening of the opaque vault overhead to mark its meridian, there
came at times a thinning of the gray wall on either side of the track,
showing the vague bulk of a distant hill, the battlemented sky line of
an old-time hall, or the spires of a cathedral, but always melting back
into the mist again as in a dream. Then vague stretches of gloom
again, foggy stations obscured by nebulous light and blurred and moving
figures, and the black relief of a tunnel. Only once the captain,
catching sight of Randolph's awed face under the lamp of the smoking
carriage, gave way to his long, low laugh. "Jolly place, England--so
very 'Merrie.'" And then they came to a comparatively lighter, broader,
and more brilliantly signaled tunnel filled with people, and as they
remained in it, Randolph was told it was London. With the sensation
of being only half awake, he was guided and put into