Presently, when breakfast was over, and I stood looking over the side into the incredibly clear water, in which it seems hardly possible that a boat can go on floating, suspended as she seems over gleaming gulfs of liquid space, down through which at every moment it seems she must dizzily fall, Tom drew my attention to the indescribably lovely “sea-gardens” over which we were passing—­waving purple fans, fairy coral grottoes, and jewelled fishes, lying like a rainbow dream under our rushing keel.  Well might the early mariners people such submarine paradises with sirens and beautiful water-witches, and imagine a fairy realm down there far under the sea.

As Tom and I gazed down lost in those rainbow deeps, I heard a voice at my elbow saying with peculiarly sickening unction: 

“The wonderful works of God.”

It was my unwelcome passenger, who had silently edged up to where we stood.  I looked at him, with the question very clear in my eyes as to what kind of disagreeable animal he was.

“Precisely,” I said, and moved away.

I had been trying to feel more kindly toward him, wondering whether I could summon up the decency to offer him a cigar, but “the wonderful works of God” finished me.

“Hello!  Captain,” I said presently, pointing to some sails coming up rapidly behind us.  “What’s this?  I thought we’d got the fastest boat in the harbour.”

“It’s the Susan B., sponger,” said the Captain.

The Captain was a man of few words.

The Susan B. was a rakish-looking craft with a black hull, and she certainly could sail.  It made me feel ashamed to watch how quickly she was overhauling us, and, as she finally came abreast and then passed us, it seemed to me that in the usual salutations exchanged between us there was mingled some sarcastic laughter; no doubt it was pure imagination, but I certainly did fancy that I noticed our passenger signal to them in a peculiar way.

I confess that his presence was beginning to get on my nerves, and I was ready to get “edgy” at anything or nothing—­an irritated state of mind which I presently took out on George the engineer, who did not belie his hulking appearance, and who was for ever letting the engine stop, and taking for ever to get it going again.  One could almost have sworn he did it on purpose.

My language was more forcible than classical—­had quite a piratical flavour, in fact; and my friend of “the wonderful works of God” looked up with a deprecating air.  Its effect on George was nil, except perhaps to further deepen his sulks.

And this I did notice, after a while, that my remarks to George seemed to have set up a certain sympathetic acquaintance between him and my passenger, the shackly deck-hand being apparently taken in as a humble third.  They sat for’ard, talking together, and my passenger read to them, on one occasion, from a piece of printed paper that fluttered in the wind.  They listened with fallen lower jaws and occasional attempts to seem intelligent.