onstitution, and the like.

He had learnt the sea in the Roumanian navy, and English out of a book;
he would still at times pronounce the e's at the end of "there"
and "here"; he was a naturalised Englishman, and he drove me into a
reluctant and uncongenial patriotism by his everlasting carping at
things English. Pollack would set himself to "draw him out." Heaven
alone can tell how near I came to murder.

Fifty-three days I had outward, cooped up with these two and a shy and
profoundly depressed mate who read the Bible on Sundays and spent the
rest of his leisure in lethargy, three and fifty days of life cooped up
in a perpetual smell, in a persistent sick hunger that turned from the
sight of food, in darkness, cold and wet, in a lightly ballasted ship
that rolled and pitched and swayed. And all the time the sands in the
hour-glass of my uncle's fortunes were streaming out. Misery! Amidst it
all I remember only one thing brightly, one morning of sunshine in the
Bay of Biscay and a vision of frothing waves, sapphire green, a bird
following our wake and our masts rolling about the sky. Then wind and
rain close in on us again.

You must not imagine they were ordinary days, days, I mean, of an
average length; they were not so much days as long damp slabs of time
that stretched each one to the horizon, and much of that length was
night. One paraded the staggering deck in a borrowed sou'-wester hour
after hour in the chilly, windy, splashing and spitting darkness, or
sat in the cabin, bored and ill, and looked at the faces of those
inseparable companions by the help of a lamp that gave smell rather than
light. Then one would see going up, up, up, and then sinking down, down,
down, Pollack, extinct pipe in mouth, humorously observant, bringing his
mind slowly to the seventy-seventh decision that the captain was a Card,
while the words flowed from the latter in a nimble incessant good.
"Dis England eet is not a country aristocratic, no! Eet is a glorified
bourgeoisie! Eet is plutocratic. In England dere is no aristocracy since
de Wars of Roses. In the rest of Europe east of the Latins, yes; in
England, no.

"Eet is all middle-class, youra England. Everything you look at,
middle-class. Respectable! Everything good--eet is, you say, shocking.
Madame Grundy! Eet is all limited and computing and self-seeking. Dat is
why your art is so limited, youra fiction, your philosophin, why you
are all so inartistic. You want nothing but