e
tragedies of human life that while we do most things by instinct or
intuition we have to clamp some 'particular reason' on our actions
before we can secure the approbation either of others or of ourselves.
Some men, like my young brother, never trouble themselves about it. But
all my life I have found myself hesitating upon the edge of actions that
might be heroic or fantastic or original or simply desirable, just
because I couldn't square them with a particular reason. It was so in
this instance. I came into the light of that doorway, and hesitated. But
the short, broad figure was not like me. In the most matter-of-fact
fashion he nodded his head and said in a clear voice with a strong
foreign accent, 'Good evening. How are you?' And I answered at once that
I was very well. He gave the cue, the cue which the _Corydon_ had
temporarily obliterated from my mind! He stood to one side and let me
see into his domain. A large central-draft oil lamp hung in the centre
of the roof of a small chamber. There was a door at the back, leading, I
surmised, to the boiler room, for in one corner stood the machine that
had attracted me from the ship, a curious hunched affair with a
violently working apparatus in front and pipes covered with snow curving
up and disappearing into the top of it. A small foot-lathe stood by a
bench, and on the bench itself was clamped a fret-work table and a
partly completed fret-work corner bracket. I wiped my face with my
sweat-rag and turned to get a good look at the owner of this variegated
display. It seemed to me I was having experiences after all.

"He was young and had never shaved the down which grew on his cheeks and
the points of his chin. Young as he was he had the lines of half a
century scored under his eyes and on his temples, thin lines on clear,
yellow skin. The whites of his eyes were yellow too, as though he had
suffered from jaundice. Which he had, as I learned very soon after he
opened upon me in a clear, sonorous voice that rolled the r's and beat
like a flail on the labials and diphthongs. He wore a blue dungaree
boiler-suit, which is a combination affair, you know, and on his head he
had an old, greasy, red fez. It seemed to me a preposterous piece of
fancy dress up a creek on the Niger River. But I found later, to my
astonishment, that Moslems were common enough there; that they had
soaked through from the Mediterranean littoral and the head-waters of
the Nile generations ago. Not