st to luck; and having done this, in spite of drawbacks, I began
to enjoy the situation amazingly.

I had long since come to the conclusion that the captain was one of the
nicest fellows I had ever met. He was utterly unlike any preconceived
and conventional idea of the merchant skipper. He never swore or
hustled his crew, or laid down the law, or did any of those things which
story has immemorially associated with his cloth. And he was refined
and cultured, and could talk well on matters outside his professional
experience. He was rather a religious man, too, though he never put it
forward, but I frequently saw him reading books of Catholic authorship
or compilation, so guessed at his creed. As an Irishman, too, he was
quite outside the preconceived type in that he was neither
quick-tempered nor impulsive, and in his speech it was difficult to
detect anything but the faintest trace of brogue. Chadwick, the first
mate, who soon recovered all his original redness, was a rough diamond,
whose table manners perhaps might not have been appreciated in the
saloon of a first-class liner, yet he was an excellent fellow, and the
same held good of the chief engineer. But the second mate, King, I own
to disliking intensely. He was a dark-bearded, sallow-faced young man,
with a cockney drawl and an infallible manner. He was certainly the
most argumentative fellow I have ever met. There was no subject under
heaven on which he would not undertake to set us all right. The captain
bore with him in good-humouredly contemptuous silence. Chadwick used to
sledgehammer him with a growl and a flat contradiction, but it was like
sledge-hammering a flea on an eider-down cushion. He hopped up livelier
than ever, with a challenge to his superior to prove his contradiction.

One day he had been trying my patience to the very utmost, when duty
called him elsewhere. I turned to the chief engineer, who had formed
one of the group, with something like relief.

"Upon my word, McBean, that messmate of yours is appropriately named."

"Who? King?"

"Yes."

"And why?"

"Because he `can do no wrong.'"

"Ay," said the Scot. "And do ye thenk the king can do no wrang?"

I looked at McBean. But the rejoinder was perfectly and innocently
serious.

I do not propose to dwell further on the voyage, for it was uneventful,
and therefore like a score of other such voyages. But to myself it was
very enjoyable, in spite of passing drawbacks