mate, attending his commander to the gangway, would sometimes venture
to say, with the greatest gentleness, "Allow me, sir"--and possessing
himself of the umbrella deferentially, would elevate the ferule, shake
the folds, twirl a neat furl in a jiffy, and hand it back; going through
the performance with a face of such portentous gravity, that Mr. Solomon
Rout, the chief engineer, smoking his morning cigar over the skylight,
would turn away his head in order to hide a smile. "Oh! aye! The blessed
gamp. . . . Thank 'ee, Jukes, thank 'ee," would mutter Captain MacWhirr,
heartily, without looking up.

Having just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day,
and no more, he was tranquilly sure of himself; and from the very same
cause he was not in the least conceited. It is your imaginative superior
who is touchy, overbearing, and difficult to please; but every ship
Captain MacWhirr commanded was the floating abode of harmony and peace.
It was, in truth, as impossible for him to take a flight of fancy as
it would be for a watchmaker to put together a chronometer with nothing
except a two-pound hammer and a whip-saw in the way of tools. Yet the
uninteresting lives of men so entirely given to the actuality of the
bare existence have their mysterious side. It was impossible in Captain
MacWhirr's case, for instance, to understand what under heaven could
have induced that perfectly satisfactory son of a petty grocer in
Belfast to run away to sea. And yet he had done that very thing at the
age of fifteen. It was enough, when you thought it over, to give you the
idea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap
of the earth, laying hold of shoulders, knocking heads together, and
setting the unconscious faces of the multitude towards inconceivable
goals and in undreamt-of directions.

His father never really forgave him for this undutiful stupidity. "We