and the new Custom Houses and the pigeon-like fowls and the little dirty naked nigger children, and the exiguity of their stock of glass and china, and the yearning of their souls for the fleshpots of the respective Egypts to which they belonged.  You must imagine this.  If anything relevant to the story of Jaffery, which, as you will remember, is all that I have to relate, happened at any of these ports, I should tell you.  I should have chapter and verse for it in Jaffery’s letters.  But as far as I can make out, the moment they put foot on shore, they behaved like the best-conducted globe-trotters who dwell habitually in a semi-detached residence in Peckham Rye.  I know Jaffery will be furious when he reads this.  But great is the Truth, and it shall prevail.  It was on the sea, away from ports and mission stations and exiles hungering for the last word of civilisation, and shore-going clothes, that life as depicted by Jaffery swelled with juiciness; and to my taste, the juiciest parts of his letters are those humoristically concerned with the doings of Liosha.

As to his hopeless passion for Doria, he says very little.  When Jaffery put pen to paper he was objective, loving to describe what he saw and letting what he felt go hang.  In consequence the shy references to Doria were all the more poignant by reason of their rarity.  But Liosha was the central figure in many a picture.

Here, I say, is another extract: 

“Liosha continues to thrive exceedingly.  But there’s one thing that worries me about her.  What the blazes are we going to do with her after this voyage?  No doubt she would like to keep on going round and round Africa for the rest of her life.  But I can’t go with her.  I must get back and begin to earn my living.  And I don’t see her settling down to afternoon tea and respectability again.  I think I’ll have to set her up as a gipsy with a caravan and a snarling tyke for company.  How a creature with her physical energy has managed to lie listless for all these months I can’t imagine.  It shews strength of character anyway.  But I don’t see her putting in another long stretch. . . .

“She has taken her position as cook’s mate seriously, and shares the galley with the cook, a sorrow-stricken little Portugee whose wife ran away with another man during the last trip.  He pours out his woes to her while she wipes away the tears from the lobscouse.  I don’t know how she stands it, for even I, who’ve got a pretty strong stomach, draw the line at the galley.  But she loves it.  Now and again, when it’s my watch—­I’m on the starboard watch, you know—­I see her turn out in the morning at two bells.  She stands for a few moments right aft of her cabin-door, and fills her lungs.  And the wind tugs at her hair beneath her cap, and at her skirts, and the spindrift from the pale grey sea of dawn stings at her face; and then she lurches like a sailor down the wet, slanting deck—­and