game, and make some scornful remark at Jim’s expense.  Most of the people there didn’t hear what was said, and those who had heard seemed to have had all precise recollection scared out of them by the appalling nature of the consequences that immediately ensued.  It was very lucky for the Dane that he could swim, because the room opened on a verandah and the Menam flowed below very wide and black.  A boat-load of Chinamen, bound, as likely as not, on some thieving expedition, fished out the officer of the King of Siam, and Jim turned up at about midnight on board my ship without a hat.  “Everybody in the room seemed to know,” he said, gasping yet from the contest, as it were.  He was rather sorry, on general principles, for what had happened, though in this case there had been, he said, “no option.”  But what dismayed him was to find the nature of his burden as well known to everybody as though he had gone about all that time carrying it on his shoulders.  Naturally after this he couldn’t remain in the place.  He was universally condemned for the brutal violence, so unbecoming a man in his delicate position; some maintained he had been disgracefully drunk at the time; others criticised his want of tact.  Even Schomberg was very much annoyed.  “He is a very nice young man,” he said argumentatively to me, “but the lieutenant is a first-rate fellow too.  He dines every night at my table d’hote, you know.  And there’s a billiard-cue broken.  I can’t allow that.  First thing this morning I went over with my apologies to the lieutenant, and I think I’ve made it all right for myself; but only think, captain, if everybody started such games!  Why, the man might have been drowned!  And here I can’t run out into the next street and buy a new cue.  I’ve got to write to Europe for them.  No, no!  A temper like that won’t do!” . . .  He was extremely sore on the subject.

’This was the worst incident of all in his—­his retreat.  Nobody could deplore it more than myself; for if, as somebody said hearing him mentioned, “Oh yes!  I know.  He has knocked about a good deal out here,” yet he had somehow avoided being battered and chipped in the process.  This last affair, however, made me seriously uneasy, because if his exquisite sensibilities were to go the length of involving him in pot-house shindies, he would lose his name of an inoffensive, if aggravating, fool, and acquire that of a common loafer.  For all my confidence in him I could not help reflecting that in such cases from the name to the thing itself is but a step.  I suppose you will understand that by that time I could not think of washing my hands of him.  I took him away from Bankok in my ship, and we had a longish passage.  It was pitiful to see how he shrank within himself.  A seaman, even if a mere passenger, takes an interest in a ship, and looks at the sea-life around him with the critical enjoyment of a painter, for instance, looking at another man’s work.  In every sense of the expression