cargo frozen up-country; with rage at that canal set fast, at the
wintry and deserted aspect of all those ships that seemed to decay
in grim depression for want of the open water. I was chief mate,
and very much alone. Directly I had joined I received from my
owners instructions to send all the ship's apprentices away on
leave together, because in such weather there was nothing for
anybody to do, unless to keep up a fire in the cabin stove. That
was attended to by a snuffy and mop-headed, inconceivably dirty,
and weirdly toothless Dutch ship-keeper, who could hardly speak
three words of English, but who must have had some considerable
knowledge of the language, since he managed invariably to interpret
in the contrary sense everything that was said to him.

Notwithstanding the little iron stove, the ink froze on the swing-
table in the cabin, and I found it more convenient to go ashore
stumbling over the arctic waste-land and shivering in glazed
tramcars in order to write my evening letter to my owners in a
gorgeous cafe in the centre of the town. It was an immense place,
lofty and gilt, upholstered in red plush, full of electric lights
and so thoroughly warmed that even the marble tables felt tepid to
the touch. The waiter who brought me my cup of coffee bore, by
comparison with my utter isolation, the dear aspect of an intimate
friend. There, alone in a noisy crowd, I would write slowly a
letter addressed to Glasgow, of which the gist would be: There is
no cargo, and no prospect of any coming till late spring
apparently. And all the time I sat there the necessity of getting
back to the ship bore heavily on my already half-congealed spirits-
-the shivering in glazed tramcars, the stumbling over the snow-
sprinkled waste ground, the vision of ships frozen in a row,
appearing vaguely like corpses of black vessels in a white world,