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 countenance made her stop and stare.

“Solomon. . . .  Oh! . . .  Mrs. Rout,” stuttered the young man, very red in the face, “I must say . . .  I don’t. . . .”

“He’s my husband,” she announced in a great shout, throwing herself back in the chair.  Perceiving the joke, she laughed immoderately with a handkerchief to her eyes, while he sat wearing a forced smile, and, from his inexperience of jolly women, fully persuaded that she must be deplorably insane.  They were excellent friends afterwards; for, absolving her from irreverent intention, he came to think she was a very worthy person indeed; and he learned in time to receive without flinching other scraps of Solomon’s wisdom.

“For my part,” Solomon was reported by his wife to have said once, “give me the dullest ass for a skipper before a rogue.  There is a way to take a fool; but a rogue is smart and slippery.”  This was an airy generalization drawn from the particular case of Captain MacWhirr’s honesty, which, in itself, had the heavy obviousness of a lump of clay.  On the other hand, Mr. Jukes, unable to generalize, unmarried, and unengaged, was in the habit of opening his heart after another fashion to an old chum and former shipmate, actually serving as second officer on board an Atlantic liner.