Of course, he was a delightful fellow.  He often amused us, and he did not always know why.  He was frank, he was gentle, but that large vacancy, the sea, where he had spent most of his young life, had made him—­well, slow.  You know what I mean.  He was curiously innocent of those dangers of great cities which are nothing to us because we know they are there.  Yet he was always on the alert for thieves and parasites.  I think he enjoyed his belief in their crafty omnipresence ashore.  Proud of his alert and knowing intelligence, he would relate a long story of the way he had not only frustrated an artful shark, but had enjoyed the process in perfect safety.  That we, who rarely went out of London, never had such adventures, did not strike him as worth a thought or two.  He never paused in his merriment to consider the strange fact that to him, alone of our household, such wayside adventures fell.  With a shrewd air he would inform us that he was about to put the savings of a voyage into an advertised trap which a country parson would have stepped over without a second contemptuous glance,

He took his ship away.  The affair was not discussed at home, though each of us gave it some private despondency.  We followed him silently, apprehensively, through the reports in the Shipping Gazette.  He made point after point safely—­St. Vincent, Gibraltar, Suez, Aden—­after him we went across to Colombo, Singapore, and at length we learned that he was safe at Batavia.  He had got that steamer out all right.  He got her home again, too.  After his first adventure as master he made voyage after voyage with no more excitement in them than you would find in Sunday walks in a suburb.  It was plain luck; or else navigation and seamanship were greatly overrated arts.

A day came when he invited me to go with him part of his voyage.  I could leave the ship at Bordeaux.  I went.  You must remember that we had never seen his ship.  And there he was, walking with me to the dock from a Welsh railway station, a man in a cheap mackintosh, with an umbrella I will not describe, and he was carrying a brown paper parcel.  He was appropriately crowned with a bowler hat several sizes too small for him.  Glancing up at his profile, I actually wondered whether the turmoil was now going on in his mind over that confession which now he was bound to make; that he was not the master of a ship, and never had been.

There she was, a bulky modern freighter, full of derricks and time-saving appliances, and her funnel lording it over the neighbourhood.  The man with the parcel under his arm led me up the gangway.  I was not yet convinced.  I was, indeed, less sure than ever that he could be the master of this huge community of engines and men.  He did not accord with it.

We were no sooner on deck than a man in uniform, grey-haired, with a seamed and resolute face, which any one would have recognized at once as a sailor’s, approached us.  He was introduced as the chief officer.  He had a tale of woe:  trouble with the dockmaster, with the stevedores, with the cargo, with many things.  He did not appear to know what to do with them.  He was asking this boy of ours.