my abstemiousness.  Three of them were examiners in seamanship, and it was my fate to be delivered into the hands of each of them at proper intervals of sea service.  The first of all, tall, spare, with a perfectly white head and moustache, a quiet, kindly manner, and an air of benign intelligence, must, I am forced to conclude, have been unfavourably impressed by something in my appearance.  His old thin hands loosely clasped resting on his crossed legs, he began by an elementary question in a mild voice, and went on, went on. . . .  It lasted for hours, for hours.  Had I been a strange microbe with potentialities of deadly mischief to the Merchant Service I could not have been submitted to a more microscopic examination.  Greatly reassured by his apparent benevolence, I had been at first very alert in my answers.  But at length the feeling of my brain getting addled crept upon me.  And still the passionless process went on, with a sense of untold ages having been spent already on mere preliminaries.  Then I got frightened.  I was not frightened of being plucked; that eventuality did not even present itself to my mind.  It was something much more serious, and weird.  “This ancient person,” I said to myself, terrified, “is so near his grave that he must have lost all notion of time.  He is considering this examination in terms of eternity.  It is all very well for him.  His race is run.  But I may find myself coming out of this room into the world of men a stranger, friendless, forgotten by my very landlady, even were I able after this endless experience to remember the way to my hired home.”  This statement is not so much of a verbal exaggeration as may be supposed.  Some very queer thoughts passed through my head while I was considering my answers; thoughts which had nothing to do with seamanship, nor yet with anything reasonable known to this earth.  I verily believe that at times I was lightheaded in a sort of languid way.  At last there fell a silence, and that, too, seemed to last for ages, while, bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my pass-slip slowly with a noiseless pen.  He extended the scrap of paper to me without a word, inclined his white head gravely to my parting bow. . . .

When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed lemon, and the door-keeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to get my hat and tip him a shilling, said: 

“Well!  I thought you were never coming out.”

“How long have I been in there?” I asked faintly.

He pulled out his watch.

“He kept you, sir, just under three hours.  I don’t think this ever happened with any of the gentlemen before.”