As character he was sterling stuff.  His name was Anderson.  He had a fine, quiet face, kindly eyes, and a voice which matched that something attractive in the whole man.  Though he looked yet in the prime of life, shoulders, chest, limbs untouched by decay, and though his hair and moustache were only iron-grey, he was on board ship generally called Old Andy by his fellows.  He accepted the name with some complacency.

I made my enquiry at the highly-glazed entry office.  The clerk on duty opened an enormous ledger, and after running his finger down a page, informed me that Anderson had gone to sea a week before, in a ship bound round the Horn.  Then, smiling at me, he added:  “Old Andy.  We know him well, here.  What a nice fellow!”

I, who knew what a “good man,” in a sailor sense, he was, assented without reserve.  Heaven only knows when, if ever, he came back from that voyage, to the Sailors’ Home of which he was a faithful client.

I went out glad to know he was safely at sea, but sorry not to have seen him; though, indeed, if I had, we would not have exchanged more than a score of words, perhaps.  He was not a talkative man, Old Andy, whose affectionate ship-name clung to him even in that Sailors’ Home, where the staff understood and liked the sailors (those men without a home) and did its duty by them with an unobtrusive tact, with a patient and humorous sense of their idiosyncrasies, to which I hasten to testify now, when the very existence of that institution is menaced after so many years of most useful work.

Walking away from it on that day eighteen years ago, I was far from thinking it was for the last time.  Great changes have come since, over land and sea; and if I were to seek somebody who knew Old Andy it would be (of all people in the world) Mr. John Galsworthy.  For Mr. John Galsworthy, Andy, and myself have been shipmates together in our different stations, for some forty days in the Indian Ocean in the early nineties.  And, but for us two, Old Andy’s very memory would be gone from this changing earth.

Yes, things have changed—­the very sky, the atmosphere, the light of judgment which falls on the labours of men, either splendid or obscure.  Having been asked to say a word to the public on behalf of the Sailors’ Home, I felt immensely flattered—­and troubled.  Flattered to have been thought of in that connection; troubled to find myself in touch again with that past so deeply rooted in my heart.  And the illusion of nearness is so great while I trace these lines that I feel as if I were speaking in the name of that worthy Sailor-Shade of Old Andy, whose faithfully hard life seems to my vision a thing of yesterday.

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