In his complete absorption, he was only vaguely annoyed by a rather loud group, whose boisterous laughter and restlessness contrasted sharply with the quiet demeanour of the other guests.  Suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder, started, looked around and met the eyes of a man whose bearded face seemed coarse and unfamiliar.  Cocktails and other good drinks had shot his peony complexion with a bluish tinge.

“What’s the matter?” the stranger said.  “Don’t you know me—­Captain Butor?”

Captain Butor, the man to whom Frederick owed his life!  And now he also recognised the other members of the noisy group.  There were Arthur Stoss and his valet, Bulke, in inconspicuous black livery, sitting a little off from the others.  There were Doctor Wilhelm, and the painter Jacob Fleischmann, and Wendler, the Hamburg’s engineer, and two sailors from the Roland, wearing new suits and caps.  They had already been engaged on another steamer of the same line and had been presented with a fair sum of money.

The men all greeted Frederick like an old friend.  Arthur Stoss, for the benefit of a New York gentleman, was retailing his old story, that he intended in a short while to give up touring and retire.  He made frequent loud references to his wife, evidently considering it very worth while to publish as widely as possible the fact that he, the man without arms, actually possessed a wife.

“I have met with the most tremendous success this time,” he said.  “Last night the audience stormed the stage and lifted me on their shoulders to the tune of ‘1492,’ the song they sing every evening in the Metropolitan Theatre.”

“1492”—­wherever he turned his eyes, on the streets and open squares, Frederick read advertisements of the ballad, a product of the vaudeville stage, in which the discovery of America, four hundred years after the landing of Columbus, was interpreted in the patriotic sense of the new nation that had since arisen.

“Well, Doctor von Kammacher, how are you?” asked Doctor Wilhelm.  “How have you spent your time?”

“Oh, so, so,” Frederick replied, shrugging his shoulders.  He did not know how he came to frame this summary dismissal of a time so rich in content.  Strange to say, here on land, in the Hoffman bar, little or none of his former impulse remained to entrust confidences to his fellow-physician.

“How’s our little girl?” Doctor Wilhelm inquired, smiling significantly.

“I do not know,” Frederick returned with an expression of cool astonishment, and added:  “Whom do you mean?”

As his answers to all their inquiries were equally curt and stiff, it was impossible to start a conversation.  He himself in the first few minutes did not understand why he had come.  It was extremely disturbing to him that the other men in the bar-room recognised the group as the survivors of the Roland.  Stoss by himself, the man without arms, the well-known marksman, would have been conspicuous.