He had arrived in New York from San Francisco two days ago. But let it not be imagined that he had been conveyed thither by any Grand-Trunk-Ocean-to-Ocean-Limited, or other refinement of an effete modernity. His transcontinental journey had occupied just three years. Since the day on which he steamed through the Golden Gate on a tramp-freighter from Yokohama he had been working his way eastward by easy stages, acquiring experience (as Jimmy Marrable had directed) of the manner in which the other half of the world lives. Incidentally he had mixed cocktails behind a Nevada bar; learned to fire a revolver without taking it out of his pocket; accompanied a freight train over the Rockies in the capacity of assistant brakeman--his duties being chiefly confined to standing by with a coupling-pin, to discourage the enterprise of those gentlemen of the road who proposed to travel without tickets; and once, in a Southern State, he had been privileged to be present at that ennobling spectacle to which the brightest nation on earth occasionally treats the representatives of an older civilisation--the lynching of a negro. In a few days Hughie would sail for England, on board the mighty Apulia. It was not often that he travelled in such ostentatious luxury: the primitive man in him leaned towards something damp and precarious on board a sailing-ship or a collier; but he happened to know that the Apulia intended going for the ocean record this trip; and since the third engineer happened to be a friend of his, Hughie had decided that four-and-a-half days and nights down among the humming turbines and the spirits that controlled them would be cheap at the price of an expensively upholstered state-room many decks above, in which he would leave his baggage and occasionally sleep. For all that he had cast a regretful eye only that very morning on a battered little tramp-steamer which was loading up with cargo alongside a wharf at Hoboken--due to sail for Europe, so a stevedore told him, in about two days' time. To-morrow he was to be taken yachting in New York harbour by an old P. and O. acquaintance, whom he had faithfully "looked up," in accordance with a two-year-old promise, at his city office that morning. In the evening, at the invitation of an American actor to whom he had once been of service in Calcutta, he was to dine at the Lambs' Club,--the New York equivalent of the Garrick and Green Room, with a dash of the Eccentric thrown in,--and the next day he was to pay a flying visit to Atlantic City.