light vessel and a choppy sea are never pleasant to a landsman. Nevertheless, I very soon got my sea legs, and then the voyage down Channel was pleasant enough. It was the end of June, and the salt breezes were gratifying after the stuffy back streets of Stepney. Before my advent Job Seal was in the habit of eating alone in his cabin, because he was an omnivorous reader, and the chatter of his officers disturbed him. He welcomed me, however, as a companion. Max Pemberton, Conan Doyle, and Hyne he swore by, and in one corner of his cabin he had whole stacks of sixpenny reprints.

The first day out I rather regretted my hasty decision to sail with him, but ere we sighted Lundy Island and Penarth I was as merry and eager to smoke as any of the villainous-looking crew.

After four days loading in Cardiff the vessel was an inch deep in coal dust, and as the heavy-swearing hands in the forecastle began “cleaning up” we slowly glided out of the Bute Docks to the accompaniment of shouting, gesticulating, and strong language. At Seal’s suggestion I had provided myself with certain articles of food to my taste, but as the grit of coal and the taste of tar were inseparable from the cuisine, and the cook’s galley the most evil-smelling corner in the whole vessel, I enjoyed eating least of all. The weather was, however, perfect, even in the long roll of the Atlantic, and the greater part of each day I spent with the burly skipper on his bridge, lolling in an old deck-chair behind a screen of canvas lashed to the rail to keep off the wind. I had quite a cosy corner to myself, and there I smoked my pipe, breathed the salt ocean breezes, and yarned with my deep-chested friend.

“We don’t carry forty-quid salooners on this ’ere boat,” remarked Joe Thorpe, the first mate, when I mentioned casually that the rats gnawed my boots at night and scampered around my cabin and over my bunk. “When a passenger comes with us he has to rough it, but he sees a sight more than if he travelled by the P. and O. or the Orient. You’ll see a lot, doctor, before you’re back in London.”

His words were prophetic. I did see a lot, as you will gather later on.

Craft and crew were, as I have said, as forbidding as can be well imagined. The vessel was black, save for a dirty red band around her funnel, old, ricketty, and much patched. On the second day out from Cardiff Mike Flanagan, the first engineer, imparted to me the disconcerting fact that the boilers were in such a state that he feared to work them at any undue pressure lest we might all take an unwelcome 

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