ing the stairs, the same dressing-case in hand.
He nodded salute, slung his luggage to the same urchin with the cry,
"Hook it, you lubber!" and, turning to me, said, "Ta, ta, sheering off
again."

"Where to now?"

"Mediterranean."

"There's no boat to-day."

"There is, though--there's mine;" and he was off.

The supposed chaplain was a stray-away from a novel by Marryat,
commanded her Majesty's gunboat _Catapult_, and was at Cadiz on the duty
of protecting British interests. At the moment his mission was to carry
important despatches to Gibraltar.

My mission to Cadiz was, partly, to ascertain the progress of the
inquiry into the case of the _Murillo_ steamer, more than suspected of
having run down the _Northfleet_, a vessel laden with railway-iron and
navvies, off Dungeness, on the night of the 22nd of January previous.
Three hundred lives had been lost on the occasion. I knew something of
that wreck, for I had seen and spoken with the survivors in the Sailors'
Home at Dover on the following evening. A dazed, stupid lot they were,
of an exceedingly low standard of intelligence. The sense of their own
rescue had overcome the poignancy of grief. I envied them their
stolidity, which I explained to my own mind by the rush of the engulfing
waters still swirling and singing knell of sudden doom in their ears.

"Guv'nor," said one clown to me, "I seed my ole 'ooman go down afore my
eyes, and I felt that grieved a'most as if I was agoin' down myself, and
I chewed a bit o' baccer."

I saw the _Murillo_ lying quietly a little distance off the land--a
handsome, shapely craft, fine in the lines, with a sharp stem fashioned
like that of a ram. She was painted black, with the exception of a band
of pink above the water-line, where she was coated with Peacock's
mixture. The British Consul informed me that he understood the inquiry
into the guilt of the master was to be carried on _secretly_. He would
not be allowed to attend it. Copies of the depositions of the accused,
and permission to see them, had also been denied to the agents of the
British Government, who applied for them for the purposes of the Board
of Trade inquiry. Though Spaniards, in private conversation, own that
the _Murillo_ is the criminal ship, they seem, for some unaccountable
reason, to be anxious that she should escape the penalty of her
wickedness, as if the national honour were concerned, and the national
honour would be served by cloaking an offence