"Volunteer," he repeated. "Excuse me, Mister, I came home from out east and took a second mate's job, there being nothing better about. I went mate when the other man died. I've had a master's ticket this ten years. Now you want me to go third mate. Where shall I end up? In the forecastle? Volunteer! I can tell you, I'm beginning to regret I ever left Hong Kong." "I see. Of course we can't help that, you know. You'd better go and see the paymaster commander. Perhaps he can put you on a ship." Mr. Spokesly took the cap, a size too large for him, which he had got on credit at Stein's Oriental Store, and went out. He was feeling very bitter. No man feels he is doing himself justice in clothes that are too large for him. Mr. Spokesly wanted to go away and hide until he could get rid of his enormous golf-cap and the coat which hung on him, as he himself put it, like a bosun's shirt on a capstan-bar. He went downstairs into the street. The sun had forced its way through vast banks of blue-black and gray-white clouds and brought out unsuspected tones in the roadway ankle-deep in bright yellow mud, in the green uniform of a Russian soldier who was carrying a polished copper kettle, and in the black-green waters of the Gulf crested with silver plumes. Without analyzing the causes of the change, Mr. Spokesly felt more cheerful. He would go to the paymaster commander, who was in the Olympos Palace Hotel, and get the price of a drink anyway. He put his hands in his pockets and whistled. His hand had closed over the ring. He thought of Archy, the shiningly successful one, the paladin of pilferers, the financial genius, down among the crawfish and awaiting those things he saw on a stall just over there, eight-armed horrors with enormous bald heads and bulging eyes and hooked beaks. And as he came to the corner of the Place de la Liberté, he encountered a gentleman in the uniform of a lieutenant of reserve. He was an elderly person, with the subdued air of those men who have somehow attained to a command without ever making any mistakes or achieving any remarkable successes. His uniform was badly cut, his trousers bagged at the knees, and a large blue anchor was tattooed on his left hand. But to Mr. Spokesly he was an angel. He was not surprised when this person made some trivial remark to open the conversation. And it soon appeared that he, too, was nursing a grievance. "What? You off the _Tanganyika_? Why, you only went out yesterday. No, the day before. Dear, dear! And what are they going to do with you?" "Want me to go up the Persian Gulf third watch-keeper of a six-hundred-ton coaster," said Mr. Spokesly, feeling the ring in his pocket and scowling. "Ah! Just fancy that." "And I been mate this six years, mind you." "Just so. How about a drink? Floka's, you know, just up here. I quite understand," this elderly angel added, raising his hand. "This is all on me, if you don't mind."