"What's your name, my man?" asked I, stepping aft to the binnacle. "My name is Jones, sir," said he readily. "And your first name?" I said. "Jack," was the answer, in an off-hand way, with a hitch of one shoulder, and a weather-spoke to the wheel; spoken in an accent you'd have expected more in a West End drawing-room than from a common sailor. "Ah," said I, sharply, "Jack Jones? I wonder how many Jack Joneses there are afloat! An able seaman, I think, Jones?"--"Why sir," replied the man, "I never rate myself, sir--'tis all one to me, able, ordinary, landsman, or boy--I carry no papers, and leave my betters to rate me." "Where were you last, my man?" I asked; whereupon I met such a cool, steady, deep look out of the fellow's strange light-coloured eyes, bloodshot as they were with drinking, that I felt almost our very two souls jostle in it: as much as to say, To all eternity fathom me if ye can! "Well, I forget where, sir," said he, lowering his look to the compass-box again: "always the way with me, after a trip, a cruise, a voyage, or whatever it may be. I've got--ha!" and he yielded his body coolly to a jerk of the schooner's wheel. "A sweet craft this, sir, but a little ticklish!" "You've got what?" said I, not unwilling to wear out the time. "I've got--no memory!" Still there was somewhat so gloomy and mournful in the next glance aloft, I don't know how it was, but I felt inclined to offer him a mate's place on trial, and so I hinted, if he knew half as well how to handle a craft as he did of steering her. To my own surprise, Jones's wonder didn't seem to be roused at the notion, except that he gave me another quick glance from head to foot, with a queer smile that struck me as if I were being questioned, instead of _him_; then he looked down over his own outfit, judging by which you'd have said he'd been shipwrecked. "Well," said I, "I daresay you've been hard put to it, somehow, Jones,--so as soon as you leave the wheel, you can go below to the steward, and get a seagoing suit of my own, till we see Calcutta, when your mate's wages will set you all right again." The man touched his battered old straw hat; but I noticed his eyes gleam for a moment by the binnacle light, and a strange twitch run round his mouth at the mention of the mate's wages: the only way I could account for it at the time being his late hard-up condition; and nothing to my mind was more deucedly pitiable, than to see the thought of a few paltry additional rupees light up a head like that, with the glistening sort of expression of a miser, as I fancied. The man had a head on him, in fact, when you eyed him, fit for a gentleman's shoulders, or more--his hair and his whiskers curly and dark, draggled though they were with the rain, not to say Cape Town mud--while the wearing away of the hair about the temples, and the red grog-streaks in the veins of his face, made him no doubt a dozen years older to appearance than he was. For my part I was quite