I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before in the close, tossing steerage: ‘O why left I my hame?’

Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, had gone off to the galley, where we could see a light.  There he found a belated cook scouring pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of these he sought to borrow.  The scullion was backward.  ‘Was it one of the crew?’ he asked.  And when Jones, smitten with my theory, had assured him that it was a fireman, he reluctantly left his scouring and came towards us at an easy pace, with one of the lanterns swinging from his finger.  The light, as it reached the spot, showed us an elderly man, thick-set, and grizzled with years; but the shifting and coarse shadows concealed from us the expression and even the design of his face.

So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of whistle.

‘It’s only a passenger!’ said he; and turning about, made, lantern and all, for the galley.

‘He’s a man anyway,’ cried Jones in indignation.

‘Nobody said he was a woman,’ said a gruff voice, which I recognised for that of the bo’s’un.

All this while there was no word of Blackwood or the doctor; and now the officer came to our side of the ship and asked, over the hurricane-deck rails, if the doctor were not yet come.  We told him not.

‘No?’ he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we saw him hurry aft in person.

Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance deliberately enough and examined our patient with the lantern.  He made little of the case, had the man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him, and sent him forward to his bunk.  Two of hi