that ever came of it. In his own words: he might just as
well have dropped them all properly addressed and stamped into the sewer
grating.

Then one day, as he was wending his weary way to the docks, he met a
friend and former shipmate a little older than himself outside the
Fenchurch Street Railway Station.

He craved for sympathy but his friend had just "got a ship" that very
morning and was hurrying home in a state of outward joy and inward
uneasiness usual to a sailor who after many days of waiting suddenly gets
a berth. This friend had the time to condole with him but briefly. He
must be moving. Then as he was running off, over his shoulder as it
were, he suggested: "Why don't you go and speak to Mr. Powell in the
Shipping Office." Our friend objected that he did not know Mr. Powell
from Adam. And the other already pretty near round the corner shouted
back advice: "Go to the private door of the Shipping Office and walk
right up to him. His desk is by the window. Go up boldly and say I sent
you."

Our new acquaintance looking from one to the other of us declared: "Upon
my word, I had grown so desperate that I'd have gone boldly up to the
devil himself on the mere hint that he had a second mate's job to give
away."

It was at this point that interrupting his flow of talk to light his pipe
but holding us with his eye he inquired whether we had known Powell.
Marlow with a slight reminiscent smile murmured that he "remembered him
very well."

Then there was a pause. Our new acquaintance had become involved in a
vexatious difficulty with his pipe which had suddenly betrayed his trust
and disappointed his anticipation of self-indulgence. To keep the ball
rolling I asked Marlow if this Powell was remarkable in any way.

"He was not exactly remarkable," Marlow answered with his usual
nonchalance. "In a general way it's very difficult for one to become
remarkable. People won't take sufficient notice of one, don't you know.
I remember Powell so well simply because as one of the Shipping Masters
in the Port of London he dispatched me to sea on several long stages of
my sailor's pilgrimage. He resembled Socrates. I mean he resembled him
genuinely: that is in the face. A philosophical mind is but an accident.
He reproduced exactly the familiar bust of the immortal sage, if you will
imagine the bust with a high top hat riding far on the back of the head,
and a black coat over the shoulders. As I never saw h