merely to be alive and busy.  He was as proud of Stephens and Jarrott’s long brick shed, where the sun beat pitilessly on the corrugated iron roof, and the smell of wool nearly sickened him, as if it had been a Rothschild’s counting-house.  His position there was just above the lowest; but his enthusiasm was independent of trivial things like that.  How could he lounge about, taking siestas, when work was such a pleasure in itself?  The shed of which he had the oversight was a model of its kind, not so much because his ambition designed to make it so, as because his ardor could make it nothing else.

The roar of dock traffic through the open windows drowned everything but the loudest sounds, so that busily working, he heard nothing, and paid no attention, when some one stopped behind him.  He had turned accidentally, humming to himself in the sheer joy of his task, when the presence of the stranger caused him to blush furiously beneath his tan.  He drew himself up, like a soldier to attention.  He had never seen the head of the firm that employed him, but he had heard a young Englishman describe him as “looking like a wooden man just coming into life,” so that he was enabled to recognize him now.  He did look something like a wooden man, in that the long, lean face, of the tone of parchment, was marked by the few, deep, almost perpendicular folds that give all the expression there is to a Swiss or German medieval statue of a saint or warrior in painted oak.  One could see it was a face that rarely smiled, though there was plenty of life in the deep-set, gray-blue eyes, together with a force of cautious, reserved, and possibly timid, sympathy.  Of the middle height and slender, with hair just turning from iron-gray to gray, immaculate in white duck, and wearing a dignified Panama, he stood looking at Strange—­who, tall and stalwart in his greasy overalls, held his head high in conscious pride in his position in the shed—­as Capital might look at Labor.  It seemed a long time before Mr Jarrott spoke—­the natural harshness of his voice softened by his quiet manner.

“You’re in charge of this gang?”

“Yes, sir.”

There was an embarrassed pause.  As though not knowing what to say next, Mr. Jarrott’s gaze travelled down the length of the shed to where the Italians, rubbing their sleepy eyes, were preparing for work again.

“You’re an American, I believe?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How old are you?”

“Not quite twenty-six.”

“What’s your name?”

“Herbert Strange!”

“Ah?  One of the Stranges of Virginia?”

“No, sir.”

There was another long pause, during which the older man’s eyes wandered once more over the shed and the piles of wool, coming back again to Strange.

“You should pick up a little Spanish.”

“I’ve been studying it.  Hablo EspaA+-ol, pero no muy bien.”

Mr. Jarrott looked at him for a minute in surprise.