impassive, he asked:

"And did you throw up the billet?"
"No," cried Jukes, raising a weary, discouraged voice above the

harsh buzz of the Nan-Shan's friction winches. All of them were
hard at work, snatching slings of cargo, high up, to the end of

long derricks, only, as it seemed, to let them rip down
recklessly by the run. The cargo chains groaned in the gins,

clinked on coamings, rattled over the side; and the whole ship
quivered, with her long gray flanks smoking in wreaths of steam.

"No," cried Jukes, "I didn't. What's the good? I might just as
well fling my resignation at this bulkhead. I don't believe you

can make a man like that understand anything. He simply knocks
me over."

At that moment Captain MacWhirr, back from the shore, crossed the
deck, umbrella in hand, escorted by a mournful, self-possessed

Chinaman, walking behind in paper-soled silk shoes, and who also
carried an umbrella.

The master of the Nan-Shan, speaking just audibly and gazing at
his boots as his manner was, remarked that it would be necessary

to call at Fu-chau this trip, and desired Mr. Rout to have steam
up to-morrow afternoon at one o'clock sharp. He pushed back his

hat to wipe his forehead, observing at the same time that he
hated going ashore anyhow; while overtopping him Mr. Rout,

without deigning a word, smoked austerely, nursing his right
elbow in the palm of his left hand. Then Jukes was directed in

the same subdued voice to keep the forward 'tween-deck clear of
cargo. Two hundred coolies were going to be put down there. The

Bun Hin Company were sending that lot home. Twenty-five bags of
rice would be coming off in a sampan directly, for stores. All

seven-years'-men they were, said Captain MacWhirr, with a
camphor-wood chest to every man. The carpenter should be set to

work nailing three-inch battens along the deck below, fore and
aft, to keep these boxes from shifting in a sea-way. Jukes had

better look to it at once. "D'ye hear, Jukes?" This chinaman
here was coming with the ship as far as Fu-chau -- a sort of

interpreter he would be. Bun Hin's clerk he was, and wanted to
have a look at the space. Jukes had better take him forward.

"D'ye hear, Jukes?"
Jukes took care to punctuate these instructions in proper places

with the obligatory "Yes, sir," ejaculated without enthusiasm.
His brusque "Come along, John; make look see" set the Chinaman in

motion at his heels.
"Wanchee look see, all same look see can do," said Jukes, who

having no talent for foreign languages mangled the very
pidgin-English cruelly. He pointed at the open hatch. "Catchee

number one piecie place to sleep in. Eh?"
He was gruff, as became his racialsuperiority, but not

unfriendly. The Chinaman, gazing sad and speechless into the
darkness of the hatchway, seemed to stand at the head of a

yawning grave.
"No catchee rain down there -- savee?" pointed out Jukes.

"Suppose all'ee same fine weather, one piecie coolie-man come
topside," he pursued, warming up imaginatively. "Make so --

Phooooo!" He expanded his chest and blew out his cheeks.
"Savee, John? Breathe -- fresh air. Good. Eh? Washee him

piecie pants, chow-chow top-side -- see, John?"
With his mouth and hands he made exuberant motions of eating rice

and washing clothes; and the Chinaman, who concealed his distrust
of this pantomime under a collected demeanour tinged by a gentle

and refinedmelancholy, glanced out of his almond eyes from Jukes
to the hatch and back again. "Velly good," he murmured, in a

disconsolate undertone, and hastened smoothly along the decks,
dodging obstacles in his course. He disappeared, ducking low

under a sling of ten dirty gunny-bags full of some costly
merchandise and exhaling a repulsive smell.

Captain MacWhirr meantime had gone on the bridge, and into the
chart-room, where a letter, commenced two days before, awaited

termination. These long letters began with the words, "My
darling wife," and the steward, between the scrubbing of the

floors and the dusting of chronometer-boxes, snatched at every
opportunity to read them. They interested him much more than

they possibly could the woman for whose eye they were intended;
and this for the reason that they related in minute detail each

successive trip of the Nan-Shan.
Her master, faithful to facts, which alone his consciousness

reflected, would set them down with painstaking care upon many
pages. The house in a northern suburb to which these pages were

addressed had a bit of garden before the bow-windows, a deep
porch of good appearance, coloured glass with imitation lead

frame in the front door. He paid five-and-forty pounds a year
for it, and did not think the rent too high, because Mrs.

MacWhirr (a pretentious person with a scraggy neck and a
disdainful manner) was admittedly ladylike, and in the

neighbourhood considered as "quite superior." The only secret of
her life was her abjectterror of the time when her husband would

come home to stay for good. Under the same roof there dwelt also
a daughter called Lydia and a son, Tom. These two were but

slightly acquainted with their father. Mainly, they knew him as a
rare but privilegedvisitor, who of an evening smoked his pipe in

the dining-room and slept in the house. The lanky girl, upon the
whole, was rather ashamed of him; the boy was frankly and utterly

indifferent in a straightforward, delightful, unaffected way
manly boys have.

And Captain MacWhirr wrote home from the coast of China twelve
times every year, desiring quaintly to be "remembered to the

children," and subscribing himself "your loving husband," as
calmly as if the words so long used by so many men were, apart

from their shape, worn-out things, and of a faded meaning.
The China seas north and south are narrow seas. They are seas

full of every-day, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand-banks,
reefs, swift and changeable currents -- tangled facts that

nevertheless speak to a seaman in clear and definite language.
Their speech appealed to Captain MacWhirr's sense of realities so

forcibly that he had given up his state-room below and
practically lived all his days on the bridge of his ship, often

having his meals sent up, and sleeping at night in the
chart-room. And he indited there his home letters. Each of

them, without exception, contained the phrase, "The weather has
been very fine this trip," or some other form of a statement to

that effect. And this statement, too, in its wonderful
persistence, was of the same perfect accuracy as all the others

they contained.
Mr. Rout likewise wrote letters; only no one on board knew how

chatty he could be pen in hand, because the chief engineer had
enough imagination to keep his desk locked. His wife relished

his style greatly. They were a childless couple, and Mrs. Rout,
a big, high-bosomed, jolly woman of forty, shared with Mr. Rout's

toothless and venerable mother a little cottage near Teddington.
She would run over her correspondence, at breakfast, with lively

eyes, and scream out interesting passages in a joyous voice at
the deaf old lady, prefacing each extract by the warning shout,

"Solomon says!" She had the trick of firing off Solomon's
utterances also upon strangers, astonishing them easily by the

unfamiliar text and the unexpectedly jocular vein of these
quotations. On the day the new curate called for the first time

at the cottage, she found occasion to remark, "As Solomon says:
'the engineers that go down to the sea in ships behold the

wonders of sailor nature';" when a change in the visitor's