“I knock off a bit of verse occasionally,” said the skipper complacently. “When I’m in the mood, that is. It generally comes times like this—when I’ve been tail-twisting the hands, and have a spell of a rest and a think afterwards.” “I see—the outcome of the vivid contrast,” said Onslow. He imagined to himself that these boasted poems would be of the “heroic” order, to the verge of melodrama. As it happened, he could not conveniently have made a worse guess. Kettle lugged from his pocket a doubled-up exercise-book, reddened slightly under the tan, and handed it across. His companion flattened out the crease, and, in the light which came from a chart-house port, dipped into the manuscript verses for himself. To his astonishment, they were one and all sonnets and ballads which might well have been written by a sentimental schoolgirl. They breathed of love and devotion and premature fading away, and at least three gushing adjectives qualified each tender noun. There was no word about the sea, on which their author had spent his life, or of the things of the sea, with which he had had all his dealings. He knew about these as few men did, but they seemed common to him, and unclean. Consequently he had delivered himself of an ode to that Spring which he had never witnessed ashore, and love songs to ladies he had never met outside the covers of cheap fiction. It was all imagination, and untutored, uninspired imagination at that. As a result, Onslow found the poems too killingly funny for words, and was consumed with a wild desire for laughter; but, with that red-bearded little savage, their maker, glaring anxiously at him from the opposite shadow, he dare not let so much as the tail of a smile dance from the corner of his mouth. He had to enjoy and endure in silence; and, with the exercise-book thrust out to the yellow light-stream, he read on through the stanzas diligently. In one, evidently autobiographical, the writer spoke of himself as a “timid frail gazelle,” in another he addressed his remarks from the mouth-piece of a “coy and cooing turtle-dove,” to a “sylphlike maiden of haughty mien,” who, at the time of the narration, was the “bewitching, entrancing, unparalleled queen” of another gentleman’s hearth. An “Ode to Excellence,” which commenced “Hairy Alfred, brother bard,” was evidently directed at a contemporary; but the past was cared for in “Cleopatra, a lament,” which a footnote stated could be sung to the tune of “Greenland’s Icy Mountains.” Probably as a collection Captain Kettle’s was unique in its clumsy, maudlin sentiment, and its general unexpectedness. Meanwhile the author was fidgeting nervously. He had not got over that initial nervousness which publication gives. He hungered for a criticism—favorable if possible. At last he made bold to ask for it.