It is one of his weaknesses. I invited him, when last we were there,
to let us search out a certain exhibit from Egypt about which curious
stories are whispered. "No you don't," he exclaimed peremptorily. He
gave me no argument, but I gathered that it is very well to be funny
about such coincidences, yet that one never certainly knows, and that
it is better to regard the unexplored dark with a well-simulated
respect till one can see through it. He had, he said, known of affairs
in the East, and they were not provided for in the books; he had tried
to see through them from all points, but not with the satisfaction he
desired. For that reason he never invited trouble unless he knew it
was not there.

Another man, very like him, a master mariner, and one who knew me well
enough for secrets, was bringing me from the French Coast for Barry at
full speed, in a fog. He was a clever, but an indiscreet navigator. I
was mildly rebuking him by the door of his chart-room for his
foolhardiness, but he laughed quietly, said he intended to make a good
passage, which his owners expected, and that when the problem was
straightforward he used science, but that when it was all a fog he
trusted mainly to his instinct, or whatever it might be, to inform him
in time. I was not to be alarmed. We should have the Lizard eight
miles on the starboard beam in another hour and a half. By this time
we were continuing our talk in the chart-room. An old cap of his was
on the floor, upside down. I faced him there, in rebuke of this
reliance on instinct, but he was staring at the cap, a little startled.
Then he dashed past me without a word for the bridge. While following
him at leisure I heard the telegraph ring. Outside I could see nothing
but the pallor of a blind world. The flat sea was but the fugitive
lustre of what might have been water; but all melted into nothing at a
distance which could have been anywhere. The tremor of the ship