Tommy was passing through the arcade of the Pennsylvania Station when his eye fell upon the book shop there.  He was startled to see in the window a picture of the Scotch engineer—­his best friend, the only man in the world who had ever been like a father to him.  He knew that the engineer was far away in the Mediterranean, working on an English transport.  He scanned the poster with amazement.

Apparently his friend had written a book.  Tommy, like a practical seaman, went to the heart of the matter.  He went into the shop and bought the book.  He fell into talk with the bookseller, who had read the book.  He told the bookseller that he had known the author, and that for years they had served together on the same vessels at sea.  He told how the writer, who was the former second engineer of the Fernfield, had done many things for the little Dutch lad whose own father had died at sea.  Then came another surprise.

“I believe you’re one of the characters in the story,” said the bookseller.

It was so.  The book was “Casuals of the Sea,” the author, William McFee, who had been a steamship engineer for a dozen years; and Drevis Jonkers found himself described in full in the novel as “Drevis Noordhof,” and playing a leading part in the story.  Can you imagine the simple sailor’s surprise and delight?  Pleased beyond measure, in his soft Dutch accent liberally flavoured with cockney he told the bookseller how Mr. McFee had befriended him, had urged him to go on studying navigation so that he might become an officer; and that though they had not met for several years he still receives letters from his friend, full of good advice about saving his money, where to get cheap lodgings in Brooklyn, and not to fall into the common error of sailors in thinking that Hoboken and Passyunk Avenue are all America.  And Tommy went back to his yacht chuckling with delight, with a copy of “Casuals of the Sea” under his arm.

Here my share in the adventure begins.  The bookseller, knowing my interest in the book, hastened to tell me the next time I saw him that one of the characters in the story was in New York.  I wrote to Tommy asking him to come to see me.  He wrote that the Alvina was to sail the next day, and he could not get away.  I supposed the incident was closed.

Then I saw in the papers that the Alvina had been halted in the Narrows by a United States destroyer, the Government having suspected that her errand was not wholly neutral.  Rumour had it that she was on her way to the Azores, there to take on armament for the house of Romanoff.  She was halted at the Quarantine Station at Staten Island, pending an investigation.

Then enters the elbow of coincidence.  Looking over some books in the very same bookshop where Tommy had bought his friend’s novel, I overheard another member of the Alvina’s crew asking about “Casuals of the Sea.”  His chum Tommy had told him about his adventure, and he, too, was there to buy one. (Not every day does one meet one’s friends walking in a 500-page novel!) By the never-to-be-sufficiently-admired hand of chance I was standing at Joe Hogan’s very elbow when he began explaining to the book clerk that he was a friend of the Dutch sailor who had been there a few days before.