not, to go down and down with each tide into the foul Hugli mud? Close to the Port Offices is the Shipping Office, where the captains engage their crews. The men must produce their discharges from their last ships in the presence of the shipping master, or, as they call him, “The Deputy Shipping.” He passes them as correct after having satisfied himself that they are not deserters from other ships, and they then sign articles for the voyage. This is the ceremony, beginning with the “dearly beloved” of the crew-hunting captain down to the “amazement” of the identified deserter. There is a dingy building, next door to the Sailors’ Home, at whose gate stand the cast-ups of all the seas in all manner of raiment. There are Seedee boys, Bombay _serangs_ and Madras fishermen of the salt villages, Malays who insist upon marrying native women, grow jealous and run _amok_: Malay-Hindus, Hindu-Malay-whites, Burmese, Burma-whites, Burma-native-whites, Italians with gold earrings and a thirst for gambling, Yankees of all the States, with Mulattoes and pure buck-niggers, red and rough Danes, Cingalese, Cornish boys who seem fresh taken from the plough-tail, “corn-stalks” from colonial ships where they got four pound ten a month as seamen, tun-bellied Germans, Cockney mates keeping a little aloof from the crowd and talking in knots together, unmistakable “Tommies” who have tumbled into seafaring life by some mistake, cockatoo-tufted Welshmen spitting and swearing like cats, broken-down loafers, gray-headed, penniless, and pitiful, swaggering boys, and very quiet men with gashes and cuts on their faces. It is an ethnological museum where all the specimens are playing comedies and tragedies. The head of it all is the “Deputy Shipping,” and he sits, supported by an English policeman whose fists are knobby, in a great Chair of State. The “Deputy Shipping” knows all the iniquity of the river-side, all the ships, all the captains, and a fair amount of the men. He is fenced off from the crowd by a strong wooden railing, behind which are gathered those who “stand and wait,” the unemployed of the mercantile marine. They have had their spree--poor devils--and now they will go to sea again on as low a wage as three pound ten a month, to fetch up at the end in some Shanghai stew or San Francisco hell. They have turned their backs on the seductions of the Howrah boarding-houses and the delights of Colootolla. If Fate will, “Nightingales” will know them no more for a season, and their successors may paint Collinga Bazar vermillion. But what captain will take some of these battered, shattered wrecks whose hands shake and whose eyes are red?