ling and "A Sentimental Bloke" were satisfactory, but
he couldn't bear the others who gave their views on love. Lawrence Hope
had done one or two good things--but the rest, as Keats, Ella Wheeler
Wilcox, and so forth, might as well be cut out. His approval of Kipling
was confirmed by Meacock's saying in the saloon, where books and authors
were a favourite pabulum, "H'm--the third mate seems to be getting very
interested in Kipling. He brought me a paper with all he could remember
of _IF_ written out on it, and asked me if I could supply any of the rest."

This literary halo aroused Bicker, who was already known to me as the
ship's poet, and had unfortunately left his MSS. at home. He now urged
his claims. "The gardener called me Poet when I was about seven or eight,
and I often get called that now." The chief, chuckling, brought off his
little joke. "I suppose that's what drove you to sea."

In connection, no doubt, with poetry, that strange device, the mate looked
back to a ship in which he once served, and which was chartered to carry
the largest whale ever caught in Japanese waters to New York for the
New York Museum. By whale, he said he meant the skeleton, of course;
but it had been sketchily cleaned, "and when we got her to New York,"
he said with a comical frown, "nobody could get near the hatches": and,
finding the sequence easy, he added that there was often some peculiar
cargo on that New York-Hong Kong run--take for instance those rows of
dead Chinamen in the 'tween-deck homeward bound.

The face of the sky often held me delighted. There is nothing, I think, of
dullness about this world's weather; and its hues and tones may still be
a sufficient testing theme for the greatest artists with pen or pencil.
To express the sunset uprising of clouds, many of them in semblance of
towering ships under full sail, many more like creatures mistily seen in
endless pastures, was an attempt in which my own vocabulary scarcely
lasted a moment. One evening, the nonpareil of its race, especially
"burned the mind."

At first the blue temple was hung with plumes of cloud, golden feathers.
When these at last were grey, a rosy flush swiftly came along them, like a
thought, and passed. It seemed as though the night had come, when the
loitering tinges of the rose in a few seconds grew unutterably red, and
the spectacle was that of an aerial lattice or trellis among the clouds,
overgrown with the heavenly original of all roses. "I