outward bound to Australia) who was the first reader of “Almayer’s Folly”—­the very first reader I ever had.  “Would it bore you very much reading a Ms. in a handwriting like mine?” I asked him one evening on a sudden impulse at the end of a longish conversation whose subject was Gibbon’s History.  Jacques (that was his name) was sitting in my cabin one stormy dog-watch below, after bringing me a book to read from his own travelling store.

“Not at all,” he answered with his courteous intonation and a faint smile.  As I pulled a drawer open his suddenly aroused curiosity gave him a watchful expression.  I wonder what he expected to see.  A poem, maybe.  All that’s beyond guessing now.  He was not a cold but a calm man, still more subdued by disease—­a man of few words and of an unassuming modesty in general intercourse, but with something uncommon in the whole of his person which set him apart from the undistinguished lot of our sixty passengers.  His eyes had a thoughtful introspective look.  In his attractive reserved manner, and in a veiled sympathetic voice he asked: 

“What is this?” “It is a sort of tale,” I answered with an effort.  “It is not even finished yet.  Nevertheless I would like to know what you think of it.”  He put the Ms. in the breast-pocket of his jacket; I remember perfectly his thin brown fingers folding it lengthwise.  “I will read it tomorrow,” he remarked, seizing the door-handle, and then, watching the roll of the ship for a propitious moment, he opened the door and was gone.  In the moment of his exit I heard the sustained booming of the wind, the swish of the water on the decks of the Torrens, and the subdued, as if distant, roar of the rising sea.  I noted the growing disquiet in the great restlessness of the ocean, and responded professionally to it with the thought that at eight o’clock, in another half-hour or so at the furthest, the top-gallant sails would have to come off the ship.

Next day, but this time in the first dog-watch, Jacques entered my cabin.  He had a thick, woollen muffler round his throat and the Ms. was in his hand.  He tendered it to me with a steady look but without a word.  I took it in silence.  He sat down on the couch and still said nothing.  I opened and shut a drawer under my desk, on which a filled-up log-slate lay wide open in its wooden frame waiting to be copied neatly into the sort of book I was accustomed to write with care, the ship’s log-book.  I turned my back squarely on the desk.  And even then Jacques never offered a word.  “Well, what do you say?” I asked at last.  “Is it worth finishing?” This question expressed exactly the whole of my thoughts.

“Distinctly,” he answered in his sedate, veiled voice and then coughed a little.

“Were you interested?” I inquired further almost in a whisper.

“Very much!”