ture, and as he talked of the widely
scattered places he had seen and the things which should have made him
wise in his generation it seemed to me that his soul must have worn a
macintosh, from which the showers of experience had been shed off
without leaving a mark. I have seen mastiffs with eyes full of
wistfulness because Nature has denied their affectionate temperaments
the gentle lives of lap dogs. Mansfield struck me the same way. Why a
man, by his spare and simple standards as rich as Cr[oe]sus, should care
to ship with him on a voyage promising maggoty biscuits, was quite
beyond his mental process. He confessed, in all frankness, that he did
it merely for the money--the pitiful hundred and fifty. There was a girl
back in England, probably as devoid of surprises and complications of
character as a lane-side primrose. I pictured her to myself as a
creature of pink and shallow prettiness. The day to which his ambition
strained as the ultimate goal was the day when he could become a curator
in the British Museum and transplant her to decent London lodgings. He
longed to placard and arrange scarabs in a plate-glass case and to
classify Chimbote pottery and on bank holidays to push a go-cart in the
park.

I was glad, however, when I went over the rust-red side of the _Wastrel_
that Mansfield went with me. We had known that we were shipping on a
mean vessel, and one shouldered out of more orderly chartings, because
of her unworthiness. Liners did not ply the tepid waters for which we
were bound: waters ridden by no commerce save the peddling of copra and
pearl shell and beche-de-mer. Yet even the warning had not prepared me
for what I found, as I first stepped upon her unclean decks and had my
initial view of her more unclean crew. Perhaps there are other corroded
hulks shambling here and there among the less frequented ports of the
seven seas as uninviting in appearance and as villainously manned as was
the _Wastrel_, but on this point I stand unconvinced. A glance told us
that her sea-worthiness was questionable and that her over-burdening
cargo pressed her Plimsoll mark close to the water line. We were to
learn by degrees that her timbers were rotten, her plates rust-eaten and
her engines junk. Her officers were outcasts from respectable seafaring,
none too cordial in their relations with admiralty courts. They had
fallen back on the hazardous command of such a vessel as this not from
choice, but necessity, precisel