n
pier-ends through four miserable hours. The less I saw of him on the
voyage the better, was my decision; and it was with a little tickle of
pleasure that I thought of the many boxes of books I had dispatched on
board from New York. Thank the Lord, I did not depend on sea captains
for entertainment.

I turned Possum over to Wada, who was settling with the cabman, and while
the tug's sailors were carrying my luggage on board I was led by the
pilot to an introduction with Captain West. At the first glimpse I knew
that he was no more a sea captain than the pilot was a pilot. I had seen
the best of the breed, the captains of the liners, and he no more
resembled them than did he resemble the bluff-faced, gruff-voiced
skippers I had read about in books. By his side stood a woman, of whom
little was to be seen and who made a warm and gorgeous blob of colour in
the huge muff and boa of red fox in which she was well-nigh buried.

"My God!--his wife!" I darted in a whisper at the pilot. "Going along
with him? . . . "

I had expressly stipulated with Mr. Harrison, when engaging passage, that
the one thing I could not possibly consider was the skipper of the
_Elsinore_ taking his wife on the voyage. And Mr. Harrison had smiled
and assured me that Captain West would sail unaccompanied by a wife.

"It's his daughter," the pilot replied under his breath. "Come to see
him off, I fancy. His wife died over a year ago. They say that is what
sent him back to sea. He'd retired, you know."

Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands
touched, before his face broke from repose to greeting and the lips moved
to speech, I got the first astonishing impact of his personality. Long,
lean, in his face a touch of race I as yet could only sense, he was as
cool as the day was cold, as poised as a king or emperor, as remote as
the farthest fixed star, as neutral as a proposition of Euclid. And
then, just ere our hands met, a twinkle of--oh--such distant and
controlled geniality quickened the many tiny wrinkles in the corner of
the eyes; the clear blue of the eyes was suffused by an almost colourful
warmth; the face, too, seemed similarly to suffuse; the thin lips, harsh-
set the instant before, were as gracious as Bernhardt's when she moulds
sound into speech.

So curiously was I affected by this first glimpse of Captain West that I
was aware of expecting to fall from his lips I knew not what words of
untold