They must have been the days to live in, when China was like that, and there was all the East, and such ships, and men who were seamen and navigators in a way that is lost. As the old master mariner, who had lived in that time, would sometimes demand of me: What is the sea now? Steamers do not make time, or lose it. They keep it. They run to schedule, one behind the other, in processions. They have nothing to overcome. They do not fail, and they cannot triumph. They are predestined engines, and the sea is but their track. Yet it had been otherwise. And the old man would brood into the greater past, his voice would grow quiet, and he would gently emphasize his argument by letting one hand, from a fixed wrist, rise, and fall sadly on the table, in a gesture of solemn finality. He was in that act, early one evening, while his wife was reading a newspaper; and I had risen to go, and stood for a moment silent in the thought that these of ours were lesser days, and their petty demands and trivial duties made of men but mere attendants on uninspiring process. Serene Mrs. Williams, reading her paper, and not in our world at all, at that moment struck the paper into her lap, and fixed me with surprise and shock in her eyes, as though she had just repelled that mean print in a malicious attempt at injury. Her husband took no notice. She handed me the paper, with a finger on a paragraph. "The steamer _Arab_, which sailed on December 26 last for Buenos Aires, has not been heard of since that date, and today was 'posted' as missing." I remembered then a young man in uniform, with a rakish cap, trying to find a key while a girl was laughing at him. As I left the house I could see in the dusk, a little down the street, the girl standing at her gate. The street was empty and silent. At the end of it the lamp-lighter set his beacon. IX. In a Coffee-Shop