en him and his
brig.

He was aware that his little vessel could give him something not to be
had from anybody or anything in the world; something specially his own.
The dependence of that solid man of bone and muscle on that obedient
thing of wood and iron, acquired from that feeling the mysterious
dignity of love. She--the craft--had all the qualities of a living
thing: speed, obedience, trustworthiness, endurance, beauty, capacity
to do and to suffer--all but life. He--the man--was the inspirer of that
thing that to him seemed the most perfect of its kind. His will was
its will, his thought was its impulse, his breath was the breath of
its existence. He felt all this confusedly, without ever shaping this
feeling into the soundless formulas of thought. To him she was unique
and dear, this brig of three hundred and fourteen tons register--a
kingdom!

And now, bareheaded and burly, he walked the deck of his kingdom with a
regular stride. He stepped out from the hip, swinging his arms with
the free motion of a man starting out for a fifteen-mile walk into open
country; yet at every twelfth stride he had to turn about sharply and
pace back the distance to the taffrail.

Shaw, with his hands stuck in his waistband, had hooked himself with
both elbows to the rail, and gazed apparently at the deck between his
feet. In reality he was contemplating a little house with a tiny front
garden, lost in a maze of riverside streets in the east end of London.
The circumstance that he had not, as yet, been able to make the
acquaintance of his son--now aged eighteen months--worried him slightly,
and was the cause of that flight of his fancy into the murky atmosphere
of his home. But it was a placid flight followed by a quick return.
In less than two minutes he was back in the brig. "All there," as his
saying was. He was proud of being always "all there."

He was abrupt in manner and grumpy in speech with the seamen. To his
successive captains, he was outwardly as deferential as he knew how, and
as a rule inwardly hostile--so very few seemed to him of the "all there"
kind. Of Lingard, with whom he had only been a short time--having been
picked up in Madras Roads out of a home ship, which he had to leave
after a thumping row with the master--he generally approved, although he
recognized with regret that this man, like most others, had some absurd
fads; he defined them as "bottom-upwards notions."

He was a man--as there were many--of