im
well enough.

"`Looks very respectable.'

"`Certainly,' says the Shipping Master quite calm and staring all the
time at me. `His name's Powell.'

"`Oh, I see!' says the skipper as if struck all of a heap. `But is he
ready to join at once?'

"I had a sort of vision of my lodgings--in the North of London, too,
beyond Dalston, away to the devil--and all my gear scattered about, and
my empty sea-chest somewhere in an outhouse the good people I was
staying with had at the end of their sooty strip of garden. I heard the
Shipping Master say in the coolest sort of way:--

"`He'll sleep on board to-night.'

"`He had better,' says the Captain of the _Ferndale_ very businesslike,
as if the whole thing were settled. I can't say I was dumb for joy as
you may suppose. It wasn't exactly that. I was more by way of being
out of breath with the quickness of it. It didn't seem possible that
this was happening to me. But the skipper, after he had talked for a
while with Mr Powell, too low for me to hear became visibly perplexed.

"I suppose he had heard I was freshly passed and without experience as
an officer, because he turned about and looked me over as if I had been
exposed for sale.

"`He's young,' he mutters. `Looks smart, though... You're smart and
willing (this to me very sudden and loud) and all that, aren't you?'

"I just managed to open and shut my mouth, no more, being taken
unawares. But it was enough for him. He made as if I had deafened him
with protestations of my smartness and willingness.

"`Of course, of course. All right.' And then turning to the Shipping
Master who sat there swinging his leg, he said that he certainly
couldn't go to sea without a second officer. I stood by as if all these
things were happening to some other chap whom I was seeing through with
it. Mr Powell stared at me with those shining eyes of his. But that
bothered skipper turns upon me again as though he wanted to snap my head
off.

"`You aren't too big to be told how to do things--are you? You've a lot
to learn yet though you mayn't think so.'

"I had half a mind to save my dignity by telling him that if it was my
seamanship he was alluding to I wanted him to understand that a fellow
who had survived being turned inside out for an hour and a half by
Captain R--was equal to any demand his old ship was likely to make on
his competence. However he didn't give me a chance to make that sort of
fool of myself becaus