ith an air of such importance that it gained flavor
and substance by the reflection of his deference. There were English
officers bound for Malta, Frenchmen for Marseilles and Americans of the
Red Cross without number bound for New York. Girls, too, clear-eyed,
bronzed and hearty, who talked war and politics beneath his very nose,
challenging his own theories. They noticed him too and whispered among
themselves, but true to his ambition to do every task at the best of his
bent, he preserved an immobile countenance and pocketed his fees, which
would be useful ere long, with the grateful appreciation of one to whom
shillings and franc pieces come as the gifts of God. Many were the
attempts to draw him into a conversation, but where the queries could
not be answered by a laconic "Yes, sir," or "No, sir," this paragon of
waiters maintained a smiling silence.

"I'm sure he's a prince or something," he heard one young girl of a
hospital unit say to a young medico of the outfit. "Did you ever see
such a nose and brows in your life? And his hands----! You can never
mistake hands. I would swear those hands had never done menial work for
a thousand years."

All of which was quite true, but it made the waiter Peter uncomfortably
careful. There were no women in the kitchen, but there was an amatory
stewardess, fat and forty, upon whom the factitious technique of the
saloon fell with singular insipidity. He fled from her. Peter, the
waiter, was already a good democrat but he was not ready to spread his
philosophy out so thin.

He slept forward, messed abaft the galley, enriched his vocabulary and
broadened his point of view. There is no leveler like a ship's fo'c'sle,
no better school of philosophy than that of men upon their "beam ends."
There were many such--Poles, Slovaks, Roumanians, an Armenian or two,
refugees, adventurers from America, old, young, dissolute, making a
necessity of virtue under that successful oligarchy, the ship's bridge.

In the Americans Peter was interested with an Englishman's point of
view. He had much to learn, and he invented a tale of his fortunes which
let him into their confidences, especially into that of Jim Coast,
waiter like himself, whose bunk adjoined his own. Jim Coast was a
citizen of the world, inured to privation under many flags. He had been
born in New Jersey, U. S. A., of decent people, had worked in the
cranberry bogs, farmed in Pennsylvania, "punched" cattle in Wyoming,
"prospected