and his ears were greeted with words in his own tongue. They gave him
hot coffee and hot soup and more brandy, and he told his story in a
burst of words that flowed like a torrent of tears--how he had been
stolen from his home at Genoa, where he used to watch the boats from the
stone pier in front of the custom-house, at which the sailors nodded,
and how the padrone, who was not his uncle, finding he could not black
boots nor sell papers, had given him these plaster casts to sell, and
how he had whipped him when people would not buy them, and how at last
he had tripped, and broken them all except this one hidden in his
breast, and how he had gone to sleep, and he asked now why had they
wakened him, for he had no place to go.

Guido remembered telling them this, and following them by their
gestures as they retold it to the others in a strange language, and then
the lights began to spin, and the faces grew distant, and he reached out
his hand for the fat chief engineer, and felt his arms tightening around
him.

A cold wind woke Guido, and the sound of something throbbing and beating
like a great clock. He was very warm and tired and lazy, and when he
raised his head he touched the ceiling close above him, and when he
opened his eyes he found himself in a little room with a square table
covered with oil-cloth in the centre, and rows of beds like shelves
around the walls. The room rose and fell as the streets did when he had
had nothing to eat, and he scrambled out of the warm blankets and
crawled fearfully up a flight of narrow stairs. There was water on
either side of him, beyond and behind him--water blue and white and
dancing in the sun, with great blocks of dirty ice tossing on its
surface.