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followed various and unpleasant consequences of a physical order — ”queer symptoms,” as the captain, who treated them, used to say; inexplicable periods of powerlessness, sudden accesses of mysterious pain; and the patient agreed fully with the regretful mutters of his very attentive captain wishing that it had been a straightforward broken leg.  Even the Dutch doctor who took the case up in Samarang offered no scientific explanation.  All he said was: “Ah, friend, you are young yet; it may be very serious for your whole life.  You must leave your ship; you must quite silent be for three months — quite silent.”
    Of course, he meant the chief mate to keep quiet — to lay up, as a matter of fact.  His manner was impressive enough, if his English was childishly imperfect when compared with the fluency of Mr. Hudig, the figure at the other end of that passage, and memorable enough in its way.  In a great airy ward of a Far Eastern hospital, lying on my back, I had plenty of leisure to remember the dreadful cold and snow of Amsterdam, while looking at the fronds of the palm-trees tossing and rustling at the height of the window.  I could remember the elated feeling and the soul-gripping cold of those tramway journeys taken into town to put what in diplomatic language is called pressure upon the good Hudig, with his warm fire, his armchair, his big cigar, and the never-failing suggestion in his good-natured voice: “I suppose in the end it is you they will appoint captain before the ship sails?”  It may have been his extreme good-nature, the serious, unsmiling good-nature of a fat, swarthy man with coal-black moustache and steady eyes; but he might have been a bit of a diplomatist, too.  His enticing suggestions I used to repel modestly by the assurance that it was extremely unlikely, as I had not enough experience.  “You know very well how to go about business matters,” he used to say, with a sort of affected moodiness clouding his serene round face.  I wonder whether he ever laughed to himself after I had left the office.  I dare say he never did, because I understand that diplomatists, in and out of the career, take themselves and their tricks with an exemplary seriousness.
    But he had nearly persuaded me that I was fit in every way to be trusted with a command.  There came three months of mental worry, hard rolling, remorse, and physical pain to drive home the lesson of insufficient experience.
    Yes, your ship wants to be humoured with knowledge.  You must treat with an understanding consideration the mysteries of her feminine nature, and then she will stand by you faithfully in the unceasing struggle with forces wherein defeat is no shame.  It is a serious relation, that in which a man stands to his ship.  She has her rights as though she could breathe and speak; and, indeed, there are ships that, for the right man, will do anything but speak, as the saying goes.
    A ship is not a slave.  You must make her easy in a seaway, you must never forget that you owe her the fullest share of your thought, of your skill, of your self-love.  If you remember that obligation, naturally and without effort, as if it were an instinctive feeling of your inner life, she will sail, stay, run for you as long as she is able, or, like a sea-bird going to rest upon the angry waves, she will lay out the heaviest gale that ever made you doubt living long enough to see another sunrise.
     

XVI.
     
     
    Often I turn with melancholy eagerness to the space reserved in the newspapers under the general heading of “Shipping Intelligence.”  I meet there the names of ships I have known.  Every year some of these names disappear — the names of old friends.  “Tempi passati!”
    The different divisions of that kind of news are set down in their order, which varies but slightly in its arrangement of concise headlines.  And first comes “Speakings” — reports of ships met and signalled at sea, name, port, where from, where bound for, so many days out, ending frequently with the words “All well.”  Then come “Wrecks and Casualties” — a longish array of paragraphs, unless the weather has been fair and clear, and friendly to ships all over the world.
    On some days there appears the heading “Overdue” — an ominous threat of loss and sorrow trembling yet in the balance of fate.  There is something sinister to a seaman in the very grouping of the letters which form this word, clear in its