Last, but not least, was my faithful cook. He was the treasure that Morris had dug up in Constantinople. Stomati was a Greek—a sea cook, he. The roar of the wind and lurch of the ship were as the blood in his veins. For twenty-five years he had lived the life of the galley. The China seas, the Great Australian Bight, the sweeps of the South American coast were as familiar to him as the native waters of the Piræus and the Ægean Sea, beside which he played as a child. He had sailed under every flag in Europe and had pursued the culinary art in all quarters of the globe. He spoke seven languages, all equally unintelligently. While we waited for steam that first night, he expatiated in a composite language, which embodied a judicious mingling of English, French, German and Roumanian, all the terrors of the Black Sea. If there was any unfortunate event which had transpired in that dismal zone during his lifetime, Stomati knew it. He could tell the names of all the ships that had been wrecked, how many people had been drowned on each. He could not only tell you the past, but was eager to make estimates of the number he expected would be drowned in the coming winter. He, himself, had been wrecked three times already, and he had stories about frozen bodies, the details of which have never been exceeded, even in the columns of the yellow journals. Old Man Gileti, the skipper, had come to grief five times, while Spero, he didn’t know how many times, but should guess it must be at least a dozen. That was why Spero looked so sad. Morris listened with mouth open to all these dismal forebodings, but smiled sickly every time I caught his eye. There are rules for everything in Constantinople and Turkey, and the list of provisions which cover operations in Turkish harbors are as long as your arm. Among other things, there is a standing law which forbids the departure of any ship after the sun has set. An exception was made, however, on behalf of the _France_ as she was registered as a salvage tug, and was licensed to come and go at her own free will, for even the Turks admitted that a sinking ship might well refuse to wait till morning before taking the final plunge. So it transpired that about one o’clock in the morning of the 16th of December, we pulled up our anchor, swung clear of the shipping in the Golden Horn, and with smoke pouring in clouds from our two red funnels, we turned her bows down the Bosphorus, towards the Euxine. The skipper had promised Odessa in thirty hours, and I was pleased enough as I turned in with the dispatches of his Britannic Majesty Edward the VII under my pillow. I did not sleep long.