occasionally been eked out with last resorts, there was a heartiness
about them which I liked; and, going down presently to his cabin, I got
him to show me more. He had already written several rhyming epistles
during the trip, which with the retiring instinct of poets he had left
to blush unseen. So we had aboard among a crew of forty or so a painter of
portraits and a writer of verse.

We had our philosopher too, Phillips, the chief engineer, veteran of
Khartoum, master of machinery, physician less active but more reliable
than the steward; but above all, the Diogenes--with a slush-lamp. His
philosophy might be no ill store about this time, when in the heat the
pitch melted from the seams of his cabin roof and mottled his bed, as he
put it: a circumstance not yet mentioned in sonnets wooing tardy sleep,
and which of course called upon that nimble sixpence of _Bonadventure_
conversation, "She _is_ a dirty ship."

XI

A note of a train of thought forced upon me hereabouts may find a place
here, as it was set down.

(_Feb. 4._) It was nothing more nor less than the appearance at dinner
to-day of a bully stew and a sort of ration lime juice, which drove my
thoughts, always willing to be driven in that direction, towards a
nervous period of 1916, my initiation into trench warfare. The meal
was something of a facsimile; and soon after it, by a coincidence, I
was sitting under the scissors of a volunteer barber much as once after
such a dinner I sat in the alleyway by company headquarters, opposite the
red roofs of Auchy. The _Bonadventure's_ bridge, I meditated as I endured
the shears of a B.E.F. man again, looked not unlike those so-called
"communication trenches" in the Richebourg district, those make-believes;
and, as the steam-valve suddenly made me jump with its thudding volley
of minor explosions, I experienced an echo of the ancient terrors in
those same scantily covered ways when cross-firing machine-guns opened
upon my working-party.

The lime juice, in the present case, was of a milder disposition than
that to which we were accustomed. Yet there was perceptible in it that
uncivilized strength which proved it to come of the same honest origin. We
were, I must confess--it is not too late--much lacking in our appreciation
of that uncompromising, biting liquid which circulated in the trenches,
carried in jars which should have been, it was felt, carrying rum. In
itself a sort of candid friend, that lime j