ost see him dancing about the bridge!"

Spragg, the assistant steward, sometimes came to swab my cabin. He had
been in a battalion of the 38th Division, when my own Division relieved
them in January 1917 on the Canal Bank at Ypres; and he had been like
myself a witness and a part of the mammoth preparations of that summer,
which ended in such terrible failure. His manner and humorous way of
telling tales beside which the "Pit and Pendulum" appears to me an
idle piece of pleasantry, unspeakably brought back the queer times and
places which we had both seen. I saw him in my mind's eye, keen and
frank, standing behind his kit with "headquarters company"--those amiable
wits--at Elverdinghe Chateau (Von Kluck's rumoured country seat, for it
was never in my time bombarded); or with pick or shovel stooping along in
the Indian file of dark forms towards that vaunted, flimsy breastwork,
Pioneer Trench at Festubert.

But still my share of Mead's watch was my best recreation. Our talk was
disturbed but little; perhaps by the signals of some ship passing by, or
by some unusual noise, such as one evening we heard with a slight shock. A
succession of rifle-shots, it sounded; and the cause was evidently some
great fish departing by leaps and bounds from the approach of that
greater one the _Bonadventure_. The interruption over, he would go on
with plans for a future in Malay. "This life," he would say, "is killing
me." He was quite as healthy, mind and body, as any man aboard. I liked
his occasional rhapsodies, in which the smell of burning sandalwood
and of cotton trees, the clearings in sinister forests with the jewelled
birds, the rough huts, the dark ladies with the hibiscus flowers in
their hair, and the lone white settler (ex-digger Mead) thinking his
thoughts in the evening, all played their part. He wished the world
back in 1860; it had outdistanced him.

XXIV

It blew from the north-east strong against us always, and we were
travelling more slowly. The sun returned, however, among those ethereal
white clouds which to perfection fulfil the poet's word "Pavilions";
we ran on into a dark sea ridged and rilled with glintering silver, yet
seemed never to reach it, remaining in a bright blue race of waters
scattered, port and starboard, with white wreaths, waters leaping from
the heavy flanks of the ship in a seethe of gossamer atoms and glass-green
cascade.

The immediate scene was one of painters and paint-pots, and