He followed me, growling behind my back: 

“The impudence!  I’ve a good mind to write to your owners what I think of you.”

I turned on him for a moment: 

“As it happens I don’t care.  For my part I assure you I won’t even take the trouble to mention you to them.”

He stopped at the door of his office while I traversed the littered anteroom.  I think he was somewhat taken aback.

“I will break every bone in your body,” he roared suddenly at the miserable mulatto lad, “if you ever dare to disturb me before half-past three for anybody.  D’ye hear?  For anybody! . . .  Let alone any damned skipper,” he added, in a lower growl.

The frail youngster, swaying like a reed, made a low moaning sound.  I stopped short and addressed this sufferer with advice.  It was prompted by the sight of a hammer (used for opening the wine-cases, I suppose) which was lying on the floor.

“If I were you, my boy, I would have that thing up my sleeve when I went in next and at the first occasion I would—­”

What was there so familiar in that lad’s yellow face?  Entrenched and quaking behind the flimsy desk, he never looked up.  His heavy, lowered eyelids gave me suddenly the clue of the puzzle.  He resembled—­yes, those thick glued lips—­he resembled the brothers Jacobus.  He resembled both, the wealthy merchant and the pushing shopkeeper (who resembled each other); he resembled them as much as a thin, light-yellow mulatto lad may resemble a big, stout, middle-aged white man.  It was the exotic complexion and the slightness of his build which had put me off so completely.  Now I saw in him unmistakably the Jacobus strain, weakened, attenuated, diluted as it were in a bucket of water—­and I refrained from finishing my speech.  I had intended to say:  “Crack this brute’s head for him.”  I still felt the conclusion to be sound.  But it is no trifling responsibility to counsel parricide to any one, however deeply injured.

“Beggarly—­cheeky—­skippers.”

I despised the emphatic growl at my back; only, being much vexed and upset, I regret to say that I slammed the door behind me in a most undignified manner.

It may not appear altogether absurd if I say that I brought out from that interview a kindlier view of the other Jacobus.  It was with a feeling resembling partisanship that, a few days later, I called at his “store.”  That long, cavern-like place of business, very dim at the back and stuffed full of all sorts of goods, was entered from the street by a lofty archway.  At the far end I saw my Jacobus exerting himself in his shirt-sleeves among his assistants.  The captains’ room was a small, vaulted apartment with a stone floor and heavy iron bars in its windows like a dungeon converted to hospitable purposes.  A couple of cheerful bottles and several gleaming glasses made a brilliant cluster round a tall, cool red earthenware pitcher on the centre table which was littered with newspapers from all parts of the world.  A well-groomed stranger in a smart grey check suit, sitting with one leg flung over his knee, put down one of these sheets briskly and nodded to me.