for approbation.

"It was splendid," I acknowledged. "I admire the quiet man of power,
though I confess that such quietness under stress seems to me almost
unearthly and beyond human. I can't conceive of myself acting that way,
and I am confident that I was suffering more while that poor devil was in
the water than all the rest of the onlookers put together."

"Father suffers!" she defended loyally. "Only he does not show it."

I bowed, for I felt she had missed my point.

CHAPTER V

I came out from tea in the cabin to find the tug _Britannia_ in sight.
She was the craft that was to tow us down Chesapeake Bay to sea.
Strolling for'ard I noted the sailors being routed out of the forecastle
by Sundry Buyers, for ever tenderly pressing his abdomen with his hands.
Another man was helping Sundry Buyers at routing out the sailors. I
asked Mr. Pike who the man was.

"Nancy--my bosun; ain't he a peach?" was the answer I got, and from the
mate's manner of enunciation I was quite aware that "Nancy" had been used
derisively.

Nancy could not have been more than thirty, though he looked as if he had
lived a very long time. He was toothless and sad and weary of movement.
His eyes were slate-coloured and muddy, his shaven face was sickly
yellow. Narrow-shouldered, sunken-chested, with cheeks cavernously
hollow, he looked like a man in the last stages of consumption. Little
life as Sundry Buyers showed, Nancy showed even less life. And these
were bosuns!--bosuns of the fine American sailing-ship _Elsinore_! Never
had any illusion of mine taken a more distressing cropper.

It was plain to me that the pair of them, spineless and spunkless, were
afraid of the men they were supposed to boss. And the men! Dore could
never have conjured a more delectable hell's broth. For the first time I
saw them all, and I could not blame the two bosuns for being afraid of
them. They did not walk. They slouched and shambled, some even
tottered, as from weakness or drink.

But it was their faces. I could not help remembering what Miss West had
just told me--that ships always sailed with several lunatics or idiots in
their crews. But these looked as if they were all lunatic or
feeble-minded. And I, too, wondered where such a mass of human wreckage
could have been obtained. There was something wrong with all of them.
Their bodies were twisted, their faces distorted, and almost without
exception they were under-sized. The