vocation. He's a good sailor lost."

"Remember that night off Vigo?"

"I don't ever want to see such another, Mr. Chayne. It was touch and
go." Captain Maturin's smile faded. No commander likes to think of the
time when a freakish Providence and not his helpless self was
responsible for the saving of his ship.

"He was on the bridge sixty hours at a stretch," said Jaffery.

"Sixty hours?" I exclaimed.

"Thousands have done it before and thousands have done it since, myself
included. On this occasion Mr. Chayne saw it through with me."

Two days and nights and a day without sleep; standing on a few planks,
holding on to a rail, while you are tossed up and down and from side to
side and drenched with dashing tons of ice-cold water and fronting a
hurricane that blows ice-tipped arrows, and all the time not knowing
from one minute to the next whether you are going to Kingdom come--No.
It is my idea of duty, but not my idea of fun. And even as duty--I
thanked merciful Heaven that never since the age of nine, when I was
violently sick crossing to the Isle of Wight, have I had the remotest
desire to be a mariner, either professional or amateur. I looked at the
two adventurers wonderingly; and so did Liosha.

"I love the sea," she said. "Don't you?"

"I can't say I do, ma'am. I've got a wife and child at Pinner, and I
grow sweet peas for exhibition. All of which I can't attend to on board
ship."

He said it very seriously. He was not the man to talk flippantly for the
entertainment of a pretty woman.

"But if he's a month ashore, he fumes to get back," boomed Jaffery.

"It's the work I was bred to," replied the Captain soberly. "If a man
doesn't love his work, he's not worth his salt. But that's not saying
that I love the sea."

With such discourse did we beguile the short journey to the Hotel,
Restaurant and Cafe Tortoni in the Place Gambetta. The terrace was
thronged with the good Havre folks, husbands and wives and families
enjoying the Sunday afternoon _aperitif_.

"Now let us have a drink," cried Jaffery, huge pioneer through the
crowd. Liosha would have left us three men to our masculine devices. But
Jaffery swept her along. Why shouldn't we have a pretty woman at our
table as well as other people? She flushed at the compliment, the first,
I think, he had ever paid her. A waiter conjured a vacant table and
chairs from nowhere, in the midst of the sedentary throng. For Liosha
was brought grenadine syrup an