having had more chance to grow since the London School of Mnemonics had gone to the bottom with the _Tanganyika_ and a good many other things. He said to himself: that's it. It isn't the work or the danger, it's the monotony and feeling nobody gives a damn. Look at me. Now I'm on my own, so to speak, gone out and started something myself, I feel twice as chipper as I did when I was on that darned _Tanganyika_ and they didn't seem to know where to send her or what to do with her when she got there. I wonder how many ships we got, sailing about like her, and gettin' sunk, and nobody any better off. They say there's ships carryin' sand to Egypt and lumber to Russia. That's where it is. You trust a man to boss the job and he can make a million for himself if he likes; you don't mind. But if he muffs it, you want to kill him even if he is a lord or a politician. I must say we got a bunch of beauties on the job now. Good Lord! It might be imagined that having found so fertile and refreshing a theme, Mr. Spokesly would have abandoned everything else to pursue it to the exceedingly bitter end. But he no longer felt that cankering animosity towards authority. He saw that authority can be made exceedingly profitable to those who display dexterity and resilience in dealing with it. Mr. Spokesly had associated long enough with Mr. Dainopoulos, for example, to conceive a genuine admiration for that gentleman's astute use of his position in the midst of diverse and conflicting authorities. Mr. Dainopoulos might be said to be loaning the Government the tackle to pull down the branches laden with fruit, and then charging a high price for the privilege of putting that fruit into his own pocket. Even the shipowners of England could teach him nothing about profits. Indeed, later on, when the war was over, and he himself was expeditiously disposing of his interests in ships, for he had known wars before and the slumps that followed them, it was to those same shipowners that he sold some of his most deplorable wrecks at the top of the market, rather mystified at their blind eagerness to close with him at any price. He was heard to say, on the Bourse at Alexandria, on that always cool loggia where so many deals are consummated over coffee and _granita_, "This will not last. You take my advice. Sell that ship of yours to the English." And his dark-skinned companion, who had been doing very well in the tobacco trade from the Piræus and Saloniki, would very likely sell, at a price that made him wonder if the English had discovered a river of money somewhere. And both of them would continue to sit there, fezzed and frock-coated, playing with their rosaries, and discussing cautiously the outlook for Nilotic securities in the event of the English withdrawing....