‘There will be trouble,’ he said softly, ‘big trouble, unless we get the wind, you know. Come, my dear fallow,’ he went on to the Doctor, ‘what is the matter with you to-night, you were not even amuséd with the Wray baby--oh!’ he laughed with a sudden unrestrained merriment curious to listen to in that sultry, joyless air, ‘that is an interésting little ãnimal. Did you see Cotter fill it with plum-duff at dinner, and Mrs Wray opposite laughing all the time, you know, and little Wray looking ’orrifiéd,--ah-ha! and the little ãnimal likéd it, you know,’ his laughter died out as suddenly, and he gazed at the Doctor with his mournful eyes,--the eyes of a man who has been to the edge of the world many times, and looking over--come back again. ‘You are hipped to-night, you are quite dull you know. Tell us a yarn of John Chinaman; he has a most curious individuãlity, annyway.’ There was silence a moment, then the spanker boom creaked slightly from pure inaction, as floors creak in houses at the dead of night, and a spark from the mate’s cigarette floated straight upwards in the dead air; then came a weird, droning sing-song whisper from the bulwarks. ‘Once upon a time,’ it said, ‘there was a poor devil of a doctor, whose lot it became after many wanderings to minister for his living, in an oven, to the extremities of John Chinaman, whereby he learnt many things,--for instance, that it was good to eat puppy-dog and go unshaven, that there was no such thing as right or wrong, beauty or ugliness, cleanliness or dirt, heaven or hell,--that there was no end to the miseries of the white man, and neither end nor beginning to the miseries of the yellow man. But also,’--the whisper almost died away, ‘he learnt one supreme good, ‘το καλὸν,’ that without which man withers--life has no taste, no colour, no scent,--the great, the glorious--My God! O my God!!’ The voice from the faintest whisper rose suddenly to a scream. With a spring young Raymond’s lithe white-clothed figure was by the Doctor’s side, his arm round his neck. ‘Steady, dear old boy!’ he said. The meaning of those muttered sayings had suddenly been rendered plain, and the mate stood leaning forward with his long arms half stretched towards the Doctor. The melancholy fatalism of his face, that outcome of his Slav blood, was veiled by a look of sorrowful concern. ‘Ohé!’ he said, ‘Ohé! tck tck----’ As for me, I moved swiftly to the wheel, and stood between the group of men and the helmsman, speaking to him at random, in the instinctive dread of what was coming next on the shrill tones that lifted themselves behind me.