"I go to sea," he replied, "if that is what you mean. Yes, in the legal phrase of the Board of Trade, I'm a seaman, and my number is _Three nine five, eight nine three_." He laughed shortly and continued to look out towards New York. "A picturesque life," I hazarded, regretting my total ignorance of it. Again he looked at me and laughed. "You think so?" he queried. "You think so?" "I speak from book knowledge only," I said. "It is usually described in those terms." We began to walk to and fro. "Well," he admitted unexpectedly, "and so it is. I don't doubt that to anyone just looking at it, you understand, it is as you say, 'picturesque,' But when you have a number like _Three nine five, eight nine three_, you have another view of it." "You have been for a long voyage?" "Oh no," he said; "Mediterranean and back, that's all." I began to realize something of the man from this. I had no knowledge of the sea, but I certainly had a mind trained by years of observation and reflection to deduce certain definite data affecting human nature. And I realized dimly that a man who regarded a run round the Mediterranean and back across the Atlantic as a trivial episode scarcely worthy of mention, might have views on literature and art radically at variance with my own. "I should have thought," I remarked, "that you would have made your home there rather than here." "There's some who do," he said. "Lots of the Anchor Line men do. But personally I'd rather be here." "It is very like England," I agreed, as he broke in. "Sure," he said. "I was just thinking as I came up the hill. I come from Hertfordshire myself. Very like the Northern Heights." "We always think," I answered, "that it is like Essex." He pondered for a moment, enjoying his pipe. "Well, it is," he decided. "You mean looking over Staten Island to the sea? Yes, only they're busier here than along Mersea Flats, eh? Oh yes, I used to know that part when I was a boy. There isn't much between Chipping Barnet and Hamford Water that I didn't know in those days." "You will go back some day?" I said as we turned. A change came over his face, and he put his hand to his chin. "No," he said. "I'll never go back there. I'm here"--he waved his pipe--"for keeps." I looked at him in astonishment. "Why?" I said, a little indignantly. "Are you not an Englishman?" For a moment he did not reply to the blunt question, but looked down at the flags. His feet were cased in red velvet slippers, I noticed, and they struck me as quite indescribably bizarre in the moonlight. His hesitation was too ominous, heavy with unimaginable complexities. His voice was muffled when he spoke. "No," he said. "I'm--an alien." At first I was impressed by the tone more than the words. It was mournful, with a streak of satisfaction in his condition that I felt was assumed. "You mean," I said at last, "that you intend to take out papers?" He looked at me queerly.