of nothing else.  First thing in the morning as I was dressing in my state-room, I would hear through the bulkhead my Parsee Dubash jabbering about the Patna with the steward, while he drank a cup of tea, by favour, in the pantry.  No sooner on shore I would meet some acquaintance, and the first remark would be, “Did you ever hear of anything to beat this?” and according to his kind the man would smile cynically, or look sad, or let out a swear or two.  Complete strangers would accost each other familiarly, just for the sake of easing their minds on the subject:  every confounded loafer in the town came in for a harvest of drinks over this affair:  you heard of it in the harbour office, at every ship-broker’s, at your agent’s, from whites, from natives, from half-castes, from the very boatmen squatting half naked on the stone steps as you went up—­by Jove!  There was some indignation, not a few jokes, and no end of discussions as to what had become of them, you know.  This went on for a couple of weeks or more, and the opinion that whatever was mysterious in this affair would turn out to be tragic as well, began to prevail, when one fine morning, as I was standing in the shade by the steps of the harbour office, I perceived four men walking towards me along the quay.  I wondered for a while where that queer lot had sprung from, and suddenly, I may say, I shouted to myself, “Here they are!”

’There they were, sure enough, three of them as large as life, and one much larger of girth than any living man has a right to be, just landed with a good breakfast inside of them from an outward-bound Dale Line steamer that had come in about an hour after sunrise.  There could be no mistake; I spotted the jolly skipper of the Patna at the first glance:  the fattest man in the whole blessed tropical belt clear round that good old earth of ours.  Moreover, nine months or so before, I had come across him in Samarang.  His steamer was loading in the Roads, and he was abusing the tyrannical institutions of the German empire, and soaking himself in beer all day long and day after day in De Jongh’s back-shop, till De Jongh, who charged a guilder for every bottle without as much as the quiver of an eyelid, would beckon me aside, and, with his little leathery face all puckered up, declare confidentially, “Business is business, but this man, captain, he make me very sick.  Tfui!”

’I was looking at him from the shade.  He was hurrying on a little in advance, and the sunlight beating on him brought out his bulk in a startling way.  He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking on hind-legs.  He was extravagantly gorgeous too—­got up in a soiled sleeping-suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a pair of ragged straw slippers on his bare feet, and somebody’s cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head.  You understand a man like that hasn’t the ghost of a chance when it comes to borrowing clothes.  Very well.  On he came in hot haste, without a look right or left, passed within three feet of me, and in the innocence of his heart went on pelting upstairs into the harbour office to make his deposition, or report, or whatever you like to call it.