ing her head for the sea. The stars then
speed by our masts and funnel till the last is gone. Good-bye, Algiers!

_Celestine_ begins to curtsy, and at last becomes somewhat hysterical.
At night, in a high wind, she seems but a poor little body to be out
alone, with me. Tripoli becomes more remote than I thought it to be in
the early afternoon, when the French sailor talked to me in a cafe
while he drank something so innocently pink that it could not account
altogether for his vivacity and sudden open friendship for a shy alien.
He wanted me to elope with _Celestine_. He wanted to show me his
African shore, to see his true Mediterranean. I had travelled from
Morocco to Algiers, and was tired of tourist trains, historic ruins,
hotels, Arabs selling picture-postcards and worse, and girls dancing
the dance of the Ouled-Nails to the privileged who had paid a few
francs to see them do it. I had observed that tranquil sea; and in
places, as at Oran, had seen in the distance terraces of coloured rock
poised in enchantment between a blue ceiling and a floor of malachite.

That sea is now on our port beam. It goes before an inshore gale, and
lifts us high, turns us giddy with a sudden betrayal and descent; and
does it again, and again. Africa has vanished. Where Algiers probably
was there are but several frail stars far away in the dark that soar in
a hurry, and then collapse into the deep and are doused.

But here is le Capitaine. There is no need, of course, to be anxious
for _Celestine_. If her master is not a sailor, then all the signs are
wrong. He looks at me roguishly. Ah! His ship rolls. But the mistake,
it is not his. What would I have? She was built in England. _Voila!_

He is a little dark man, with quick, questioning eyes, and hair like a
clothesbrush. His short alert hair, his raised and querulous eyebrows,
his taut moustaches, and a bit of beard that hangs like a dagger from
his under lip, give him the appearance of constant surprise and
fretfulness. When he is talking to me he is embarrassingly playful--but
I shall show him presently, with fair luck, that my inelastic Saxon
putty can transmute itself, can also volatilise in abandonment to
sparkling nonsense; yet not tonight--not tonight, monsieur. He is so
gay and friendly to me whenever he sees me. But when one of the staff
does that which is not down in the book, I become alarmed. Monsieur
bangs the table till the cruet-stoppers leap out, and his eyes are
unpl