a maid or companion (as I fancied), carrying parcels; the other, a shabbily-dressed man, who was the last to come up from the tender. The woman was going down the companion-way when he stepped on deck with a single bag in his hand, and I noticed that he watched her with a strange look in his eyes. He stood still as he gazed, and remained so for a moment after she had gone; then he seemed to recover himself, and started, as I thought, almost guiltily, when he saw that my attention was attracted. He nervously shifted his bag from one hand to the other, and looked round as though not certain of where he should go. A steward came to him officiously, and patronisingly too,--which is the bearing of servants to shabbily-dressed people,--but he shook his head, caught his bag smartly away from the steward’s fingers, and moved towards the after part of the ship, reserved for intermediate passengers. As he went he hesitated, came to the side of the vessel, looked down at the tender for a moment, cast his eyes to where the anchor was being weighed, made as if he would go back to the tender, then, seeing that the ladder was now drawn up, sighed, and passed on to the second-class companion-way, through which he disappeared. I stood commenting idly to myself upon this incident, which, slight though it was, appeared to have significance of a kind, when Hungerford, the fifth officer, caught me slyly by the arm and said, “Lucky fellow! Nothing to do but watch the world go by. I wish I had you in the North Atlantic on a whaler, or in the No Man’s Sea on a pearl-smack for a matter of thirty days.” “What would come of that, Hungerford?” said I. “An exchange of matter for mind, Marmion; muscle for meditation, physics for philosophy.” “You do me too much honour; at present I’ve neither mind, meditation, nor philosophy; I am simply vegetating.” “Which proves you to be demoralised. I never saw a surgeon on a ship who wasn’t. They began with mind--more or less--they ate the fruits of indolence, got precious near being sinful as well as indolent, and ended with cheap cynicism, with the old ‘quid refert’--the thing Hamlet plagiarised in his, ‘But it is no matter.’” “Isn’t this an unusual occupation for you, Hungerford--this Swift-like criticism?” “Swift-like, is it? You see, I’ve practised on many of your race, Marmion, and I have it pat now. You are all of two classes--those who sicken in soul and leave after one trip, and those who make another trip and are lost.” “Lost? How?” Hungerford pressed his fingers hard on my breastbone, looked at me enigmatically from under his well-hung brows, and replied: “Brains put out to seed, morals put out to vegetate--that’s ‘lost.’” “What about fifth officers?”