I answered that I did, and went into our quarters where Villiers had just arrived from the spree ashore. He was a trifle mellow as everybody had insisted on drinking with him, but at bottom he’s a good fellow, for he is staying on board the _Pamir_ and I shan’t have to bother with the engine any more. If he had wanted, the office would have given him some leave after the sinking of the _Mer-Morte_, but he said that when one had had an escape like that, there was nothing more to be afraid of and that he would be a mascot for the _Pamir_. The office paid all his losses promptly--which fairly astonished me--but didn’t increase his pay a cent. Villiers has had more technical training than Muriac, who began at sixteen as a fireman on a coasting vessel and knew his engine as he knows his own pocket, without having a word of theory. Villiers went through the school of the Arts et Métiers and bores us stiff at meals with rot about Carnot’s law, the conservation of energy, and thermodynamics. Some days Fourgues looks askance at him, not liking to have people on the boat who know more than he, on no matter what subject. But he can’t say anything. Villiers, in spite of his somewhat affected manner, runs his show to perfection. He told me that he arrived just in time; otherwise the steam steering-gear, the condenser, and the boilers would have gone bust. I can well believe it. As long as the machinery keeps going, I am able to boss the job. But if it had begun to jib, I shouldn’t have known what the deuce to do. At Algiers we loaded two thousand cubic metres of firewood. It is easy to stow--throw it in the hold and it settles itself. It isn’t dirty; you can be sure it won’t break. Fourgues himself found that on the whole it was as good as coal as a cargo. It was to warm the _poilus_ of the Army of the East and we were ready to start, but at the last moment they told us to go and complete our cargo in France and ordered us to Cette. Fourgues tried to say that at Cette they’d probably have little for him to take and that the _Pamir_ would lose eight days, during which the soldiers would be shivering with cold at Salonica. But as he was already on poorish terms with the Naval authorities, because of his talk of guns, wireless, and so on, they told him they had had enough of him and ordered him to go to Cette without giving any more trouble.