Captain MacWhirr was trying to do up the top button of his oilskin coat
with unwonted haste. The hurricane, with its power to madden the seas,
to sink ships, to uproot trees, to overturn strong walls and dash the
very birds of the air to the ground, had found this taciturn man in
its path, and, doing its utmost, had managed to wring out a few words.
Before the renewed wrath of winds swooped on his ship, Captain MacWhirr
was moved to declare, in a tone of vexation, as it were: "I wouldn't
like to lose her."

He was spared that annoyance.



VI

On A bright sunshiny day, with the breeze chasing her smoke far ahead,
the Nan-Shan came into Fu-chau. Her arrival was at once noticed on
shore, and the seamen in harbour said: "Look! Look at that steamer.
What's that? Siamese--isn't she? Just look at her!"

She seemed, indeed, to have been used as a running target for the
secondary batteries of a cruiser. A hail of minor shells could not have
given her upper works a more broken, torn, and devastated aspect: and
she had about her the worn, weary air of ships coming from the far ends
of the world--and indeed with truth, for in her short passage she had
been very far; sighting, verily, even the coast of the Great Beyond,
whence no ship ever returns to give up her crew to the dust of the
earth. She was incrusted and gray with salt to the trucks of her masts
and to the top of her funnel; as though (as some facetious seaman said)
"the crowd on board had fished her out somewhere from the bottom of the