ods from the hold. One of the ships
close to me was a beautiful little Spanish schooner, with her name La
Reina in big gold letters on her transom. She was evidently one of those
very fast fruit boats, from the Canary Islands, of which I had heard the
seamen at Oulton speak. She was discharging oranges into a lighter, when
I first saw her. The sweet, heavy smell of the bruised peels scented the
river for many yards.

I was looking at this schooner, wishing that I could pass an hour in her
hold, among those delicious boxes, when a bearded man came on deck from
her cabin. He looked at the shore, straight at myself as I thought,
raising his hand swiftly as though to beckon me to him. A boat pushed
out instantly, in answer to the hand, from the garden next to the one
in which I stood. The waterman, pulling to the schooner, talked with the
man for a moment, evidently settling the amount of his fare. After the
haggling, my gentleman climbed into the boat by a little rope-ladder at
the stern. Then the boatman pulled away upstream, going on the last of
the flood, within twenty yards of where I stood.

I had watched them idly, attracted, in the beginning, by that sudden
raising of the hand. But as they passed me, there came a sudden puff
of wind, strong enough to flurry the water into wrinkles. It lifted the
gentleman's hat, so that he saved it only by a violent snatch which
made the boat rock. As he jammed the hat down he broke or displaced some
string or clip near his ears. At any rate his beard came adrift on the
side nearest to me. The man was wearing a false beard. He remedied the
matter at once, very cleverly, so that I may have been the only witness;
but I saw that the boatman was in the man's secret, whatever it was. He
pulled hard on his starboard oar, bringing the boat partly across the
current, thus screening him from everybody except the workers in the
ships. It must have seemed to all who saw him that he was merely pulling
to another arch of London Bridge.

I was not sure of the man's face. It seemed handsome; that was all that
I could say of it. But I was fascinated by the mystery. I wondered
why he was wearing a false beard. I wondered what he was doing in the
schooner. I imagined all sorts of romantic plots in which he was taking
part. I watched his boat go through the Bridge with the feeling that
I was sharing in all sorts of adventures already. There was a fall of
water at the Bridge which made the river dang