good and evil fortune of a passage. Your ship is a tender
creature, whose idiosyncrasies must be attended to if you mean her
to come with credit to herself and you through the rough-and-tumble
of her life.



XV.



So seemed to think the new captain, who arrived the day after we
had finished loading, on the very eve of the day of sailing. I
first beheld him on the quay, a complete stranger to me, obviously
not a Hollander, in a black bowler and a short drab overcoat,
ridiculously out of tone with the winter aspect of the waste-lands,
bordered by the brown fronts of houses with their roofs dripping
with melting snow.

This stranger was walking up and down absorbed in the marked
contemplation of the ship's fore and aft trim; but when I saw him
squat on his heels in the slush at the very edge of the quay to
peer at the draught of water under her counter, I said to myself,
"This is the captain." And presently I descried his luggage coming
along--a real sailor's chest, carried by means of rope-beckets
between two men, with a couple of leather portmanteaus and a roll
of charts sheeted in canvas piled upon the lid. The sudden,
spontaneous agility with which he bounded aboard right off the rail
afforded me the first glimpse of his real character. Without
further preliminaries than a friendly nod, he addressed me: "You