se obstacles
to liberty was named Gruenbaum, I observed.

"But what I was going to tell you about was a man who was at one time in
Gruenbaum's employ, a man whom I had run against before, a Captain
Macedoine. I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of him. He was a
very remarkable man for all that. He wasn't a captain at all, really,
you know. As it happens, I knew that much about him a long while back,
when I was in the Maracaibo Line, running with mails, passengers, and
fruit between Colombian ports and New Orleans. No; they were absorbed
long ago. The big Yucatan Steamship Company opened its big jaws one day
and gulped down the Maracaibo outfit at one swallow. And we all had to
come home. It was a fairly lucrative billet while it lasted, and
Macedoine, who was a chief steward, may have put by a good bit of money.
He had that reputation, and judging by experience I should say at least
half of what we heard was true. But what interested me when I was
sailing with him was his character, as revealed by his hobby. For it was
a hobby with him and a fairly expensive one, too, posing as an educated
man of old family. It was the great preoccupation of his life. You might
almost be justified in calling him an artist. He was a big, solemn,
clean-shaven person, with an air of haughtiness which impressed
passengers tremendously. It was this air which got him the nick-name of
captain, and it stuck. Two or three young girls, who were making the
trip, came up to him the first day out, and one of them exclaimed, 'Oh,
Captain, can we ...' something or other. The skipper was a dried-up
little shell-back who hated passengers and never came down on the
promenade deck at all. The bell-hop, an immoral little demon in buttons,
who had come from a reformatory, heard the remark and in a few minutes
it was all over the pantry and glory-hole. 'Captain Macedoine.' When he
gave one of the scullions a calling down next day, the man, a typical
Louisiana nigger, answered in the inevitable musical drawl: 'All right,
sah, Captain Macedoine!' It stuck. It hit the popular fancy. More than
that, it hit his own fancy, too, for when he went home to England,
'retired on a competency,' as he phrased it, he retired as Captain
Macedoine; late of the American Merchant Marine.

"But that was only a side issue. He let it be known, in the subtlest
possible manner, that he was of ancient lineage. He had been heard to
speak of Alexander of Macedon! Yes, you laug