with him up the Mediterranean, I hailed the idea with delight. Job Seal was quite a chance patient. He called one evening at the surgery in Commercial Road East, where I was acting as locum for a doctor named Bidwell, and consulted me about his rheumatism. A big, deep-chested, thick-set man, with grey hair, reddish uncut beard, big hands, shaggy brows, and a furrowed face browned by sea and sun; he spoke in a deep bass, interlarding his conversation with nautical expressions which were, to me, mostly unintelligible. The liniment I gave him apparently suited his ailment, for he came again and again, until one evening he called and declared that I had effected a cure as marvellous as that of Sequah. locum “My boat, the Thrush, is layin’ at Fresh Wharf, and I sail on Saturday for Cardiff, where we take in coal for Leghorn. Now, if you ain’t got anything better to do, doctor, don’t you sign on why as steward at a bob a day, and come with me for the round trip?” he suggested. “You told me the other night that you’re bein’ paid off from here on Saturday. My boat ain’t exactly a liner, you know, but I daresay you could shake down comfortable like, and as the trip’ll take a couple o’ months, you’d see most of the ports up to Smyrna. Besides, this is just the right time o’ year for a blow. It ’ud do you good.” Thrush The suggestion certainly appealed to me. I had never been afloat farther than Ramsgate by the Marguerite, and for years had longed to go abroad and see those wonderful paradises of the Sunny South of which, like other people, I had witnessed highly-coloured dissolving views. Therefore I accepted the bluff old captain’s hospitality, signed the ship’s papers in a back office off Leadenhall Street, and on Saturday evening boarded as black, grimy, and forbidding a craft as ever dropped down the Thames. Marguerite Job Seal was right. The Thrush was not by any means a liner, and its passenger accommodation was restricted. My cabin was very small, very stuffy, and very dirty; just as might be expected of a Mediterranean tramp steamer. As the outward cargo was invariably Cardiff steam coal consigned to the well-known firm of Messrs. Agius, of Naples, and Malta, there was over everything a layer of fine coal dust, while the faces of both officers and crew seemed ingrained with black. Thrush The first day out I confess that I did not feel over well. A
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