ged over
rasping sands, white and hot in the sun. This gave place to a sense of
intolerable anguish. My skin was scorching in the torment of fire. The
gong clanged and knelled. The sparkling points of light flashed past me
in an interminable stream, as though the whole sidereal system were
dropping into the void. I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and opened
my eyes. Two men were kneeling beside me, working over me. My mighty
rhythm was the lift and forward plunge of a ship on the sea. The
terrific gong was a frying-pan, hanging on the wall, that rattled and
clattered with each leap of the ship. The rasping, scorching sands were
a man's hard hands chafing my naked chest. I squirmed under the pain of
it, and half lifted my head. My chest was raw and red, and I could see
tiny blood globules starting through the torn and inflamed cuticle.

"That'll do, Yonson," one of the men said. "Carn't yer see you've
bloomin' well rubbed all the gent's skin orf?"

The man addressed as Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type, ceased
chafing me, and arose awkwardly to his feet. The man who had spoken to
him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly pretty, almost
effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed the sound of Bow Bells with
his mother's milk. A draggled muslin cap on his head and a dirty
gunny-sack about his slim hips proclaimed him cook of the decidedly dirty
ship's galley in which I found myself.

"An' 'ow yer feelin' now, sir?" he asked, with the subservient smirk
which comes only of generations of tip-seeking ancestors.

For reply, I twisted weakly into a sitting posture, and was helped by
Yonson to my feet. The rattle and bang of the frying-pan was grating
horribly on my nerves. I could not collect my thoughts. Clutching the
woodwork of the galley for support,--and I confess the grease with which
it was scummed put my teeth on edge,--I reached across a hot
cooking-range to the offending utensil, unhooked it, and wedged it
securely into the coal-box.

The cook grinned at my exhibition of nerves, and thrust into my hand a
steaming mug with an "'Ere, this'll do yer good." It was a nauseous
mess,--ship's coffee,--but the heat of it was revivifying. Between gulps
of the molten stuff I glanced down at my raw and bleeding chest and
turned to the Scandinavian.

"Thank you, Mr. Yonson," I said; "but don't you think your measures were
rather heroic?"

It was because he understood the