lieved to be going. Base hopes were expressed that the rate of
exchange might be a thousand to the pound. No one imagined that this
would some day be surpassed by eleven thousand. The Argentine had been
expensive; the cheapness of Germany was thrown up all the clearer.
As, however, I had no anxiety to buy a safety razor, mouth-organs,
clocks, and pocket manicure sets, to which and other articles like them
I imagined the German cheapness would be limited, I was not elated on
that score.

At any rate, here we were steaming north at a steady speed, with a light
breeze ahead, and the coast of the Argentine slipping past, dimly seen.
And everything was bent for England. For weeks the chief had expressed a
longing for pancakes at almost every meal; and now, auspicious, they
came. On the other hand, the cheese was done. Dark suspicions about a
certain cake were also whispered; knowing ones, whose information was
that Hosea had sent one aboard from Bahia Blanca for the benefit of
the saloon, saw villainy in the delay of its forthcoming. When it did
appear its pomp of white icing and green and red crescents, and diamonds
of fruit ornaments, certainly warranted an anxiety, as for crown jewels.

Meacock, the ever-busy and never-flustered, about this time showed me
his private notebook, in which he had from time to time copied verses
and aphorisms, chiefly from _Nash's Magazine_, which he considered worthy.
In this anthology of his I might have seen the signs of a literary
revival aboard which shortly afterwards befell. I daresay he would have
expanded a remark of his, "Novels were untrue to life, but life was not
by itself interesting enough" (during the war he had commanded a trawler
in the Mediterranean), had not the slow flash of a lighthouse appeared
on the port side. He climbed to Monkey Island to take a bearing. The
blurred lights of Mar del Plata past, our course was altered to agree
with the set-back of the coast. Mead came up for his watch, eight bells
went, and Meacock departed. His "Ay, ay" to the retiring steersman's
report, the apprentice's reading of the log, and the forward lookout's
shout "The lights are bright, sir," always had a handsome resonance and
lingering dignity.

Mead was by this time full of Hamburg, and he kept breaking into songs
in very low Low German, and memories of one Helen, not without sighs.
That romance was not the first, nor the last, which I heard from him. He
would show me Hamburg! and by