He had the cabin arranged in accordance with his simple ideal of comfort at sea.  A big bookcase (he was a great reader) occupied one side of his stateroom; the portrait of his late wife, a flat bituminous oil-painting representing the profile and one long black ringlet of a young woman, faced his bed-place.  Three chronometers ticked him to sleep and greeted him on waking with the tiny competition of their beats.  He rose at five every day.  The officer of the morning watch, drinking his early cup of coffee aft by the wheel, would hear through the wide orifice of the copper ventilators all the splashings, blowings, and splutterings of his captain’s toilet.  These noises would be followed by a sustained deep murmur of the Lord’s Prayer recited in a loud earnest voice.  Five minutes afterwards the head and shoulders of Captain Whalley emerged out of the companion-hatchway.  Invariably he paused for a while on the stairs, looking all round at the horizon; upwards at the trim of the sails; inhaling deep draughts of the fresh air.  Only then he would step out on the poop, acknowledging the hand raised to the peak of the cap with a majestic and benign “Good morning to you.”  He walked the deck till eight scrupulously.  Sometimes, not above twice a year, he had to use a thick cudgel-like stick on account of a stiffness in the hip—­a slight touch of rheumatism, he supposed.  Otherwise he knew nothing of the ills of the flesh.  At the ringing of the breakfast bell he went below to feed his canaries, wind up the chronometers, and take the head of the table.  From there he had before his eyes the big carbon photographs of his daughter, her husband, and two fat-legged babies —­his grandchildren—­set in black frames into the maplewood bulkheads of the cuddy.  After breakfast he dusted the glass over these portraits himself with a cloth, and brushed the oil painting of his wife with a plumate kept suspended from a small brass hook by the side of the heavy gold frame.  Then with the door of his stateroom shut, he would sit down on the couch under the portrait to read a chapter out of a thick pocket Bible—­her Bible.  But on some days he only sat there for half an hour with his finger between the leaves and the closed book resting on his knees.  Perhaps he had remembered suddenly how fond of boat-sailing she used to be.

She had been a real shipmate and a true woman too.  It was like an article of faith with him that there never had been, and never could be, a brighter, cheerier home anywhere afloat or ashore than his home under the poop-deck of the Condor, with the big main cabin all white and gold, garlanded as if for a perpetual festival with an unfading wreath.  She had decorated the center of every panel with a cluster of home flowers.  It took her a twelvemonth to go round the cuddy with this labor of love.  To him it had remained a marvel of painting, the highest achievement of taste and skill; and as to old Swinburne, his mate, every time he came down to his meals he stood transfixed