But it was their faces. I could not help remembering what Miss West
had just told me--that ships always sailed with several lunatics or
idiots in their crews. But these looked as if they were all lunatic
or feeble-minded. And I, too, wondered where such a mass of human
wreckage could have been obtained. There was something wrong with
all of them. Their bodies were twisted, their faces distorted, and
almost without exception they were under-sized. The several quite
fairly large men I marked were vacant-faced. One man, however, large
and unmistakably Irish, was also unmistakably mad. He was talking
and muttering to himself as he came out. A little, curved, lop-sided
man, with his head on one side and with the shrewdest and wickedest
of faces and pale blue eyes, addressed an obscene remark to the mad
Irishman, calling him O'Sullivan. But O'Sullivan took no notice and
muttered on. On the heels of the little lop-sided man appeared an
overgrown dolt of a fat youth, followed by another youth so tall and
emaciated of body that it seemed a marvel his flesh could hold his
frame together.

Next, after this perambulating skeleton, came the weirdest creature I
have ever beheld. He was a twisted oaf of a man. Face and body were
twisted as with the pain of a thousand years of torture. His was the
face of an ill-treated and feeble-minded faun. His large black eyes
were bright, eager, and filled with pain; and they flashed
questioningly from face to face and to everything about. They were
so pitifully alert, those eyes, as if for ever astrain to catch the
clue to some perplexing and threatening enigma. Not until afterwards
did I learn the cause of this. He was stone deaf, having had his
ear-drums destroyed in the boiler explosion which had wrecked the
rest of him.