e wind."

When the bell rang Captain Whalley's authoritative voice boomed out
through a closed door, "Sit down and don't wait for me." And his
impressed officers took their places, exchanging looks and whispers
across the table. What! No breakfast? And after apparently knocking
about all night on deck, too! Clearly, there was something in the wind.
In the skylight above their heads, bowed earnestly over the plates,
three wire cages rocked and rattled to the restless jumping of the
hungry canaries; and they could detect the sounds of their "old
man's" deliberate movements within his state-room. Captain Whalley was
methodically winding up the chronometers, dusting the portrait of
his late wife, getting a clean white shirt out of the drawers, making
himself ready in his punctilious unhurried manner to go ashore. He could
not have swallowed a single mouthful of food that morning. He had made
up his mind to sell the Fair Maid.

III

Just at that time the Japanese were casting far and wide for ships
of European build, and he had no difficulty in finding a purchaser, a
speculator who drove a hard bargain, but paid cash down for the Fair
Maid, with a view to a profitable resale. Thus it came about that
Captain Whalley found himself on a certain afternoon descending the
steps of one of the most important post-offices of the East with a slip
of bluish paper in his hand. This was the receipt of a registered letter
enclosing a draft for two hundred pounds, and addressed to Melbourne.
Captain Whalley pushed the paper into his waistcoat-pocket, took his
stick from under his arm, and walked down the street.

It was a recently opened and untidy thoroughfare with rudimentary
side-walks and a soft layer of dust cushioning the whole width of
the road. One end touched the slummy street of Chinese shops near the
harbor, the other drove straight on, without houses, for a couple of
miles, through patches of jungle-like vegetation, to the yard gates
of the new Consolidated Docks Company. The crude frontages of the new
Government buildings alternated with the blank fencing of vacant plots,
and the view of the sky seemed to give an added spaciousness to the
broad vista. It was empty and shunned by natives after business
hours, as though they had expected to see one of the tigers from the
neighborhood of the New Waterworks on the hill coming at a loping canter
down the middle to get a Chinese shopkeeper for supper. Captain Whalley
was no