, remotely hidden in a sort
of inadvertent way a certain number of ambiguous cases which I didn't
examine, but which I gathered were a provision against the need of a
trade.

The captain was a most extraordinary creature, under the impression we
were after copper ore; he was a Roumanian Jew, with twitching, excitable
features, who had made his way to a certificate after some preliminary
naval experiences in the Black Sea. The mate was an Essex man of
impenetrable reserve. The crew were astoundingly ill-clad and destitute
and dirty; most of them youths, unwashed, out of colliers. One, the cook
was a mulatto; and one, the best-built fellow of them all, was a Breton.
There was some subterfuge about our position on board--I forget the
particulars now--I was called the supercargo and Pollack was the
steward. This added to the piratical flavour that insufficient funds and
Gordon-Nasmyth's original genius had already given the enterprise.

Those two days of bustle at Gravesend, under dingy skies, in narrow,
dirty streets, were a new experience for me. It is like nothing else in
my life. I realised that I was a modern and a civilised man. I found
the food filthy and the coffee horrible; the whole town stank in my
nostrils, the landlord of the Good Intent on the quay had a stand-up
quarrel with us before I could get even a hot bath, and the bedroom
I slept in was infested by a quantity of exotic but voracious flat
parasites called locally "bugs," in the walls, in the woodwork,
everywhere. I fought them with insect powder, and found them comatose
in the morning. I was dipping down into the dingy underworld of the
contemporary state, and I liked it no better than I did my first dip
into it when I stayed with my Uncle Nicodemus Frapp at the bakery at
Chatham--where, by-the-by, we had to deal with cockroaches of a smaller,
darker variety, and also with bugs of sorts.

Let me confess that through all this time before we started I was
immensely self-conscious, and that Beatrice played the part of audience
in my imagination throughout. I was, as I say, "saving the situation,"
and I was acutely aware of that. The evening before we sailed, instead
of revising our medicine-chest as I had intended, I took the car and
ran across country to Lady Grove to tell my aunt of the journey I was
making, dress, and astonish Lady Osprey by an after dinner call.

The two ladies were at home and alone beside a big fire that seemed
wonderfully cheerf