Some of the sailors drew their hands quickly across their breasts, and others swore in some alarm, and the bar-keeper drank the glass of whiskey he had brought for Guido at a gulp, and then readjusted his apron to show that nothing had disturbed his equanimity.  Guido sat up, with his head against the chief engineer’s knees, and opened his eyes, and his ears were greeted with words in his own tongue.  They gave him hot coffee and hot soup and more brandy, and he told his story in a burst of words that flowed like a torrent of tears—­how he had been stolen from his home at Genoa, where he used to watch the boats from the stone pier in front of the custom-house, at which the sailors nodded, and how the padrone, who was not his uncle, finding he could not black boots nor sell papers, had given him these plaster casts to sell, and how he had whipped him when people would not buy them, and how at last he had tripped, and broken them all except this one hidden in his breast, and how he had gone to sleep, and he asked now why had they wakened him, for he had no place to go.

Guido remembered telling them this, and following them by their gestures as they retold it to the others in a strange language, and then the lights began to spin, and the faces grew distant, and he reached out his hand for the fat chief engineer, and felt his arms tightening around him.

A cold wind woke Guido, and the sound of something throbbing and beating like a great clock.  He was very warm and tired and lazy, and when he raised his head he touched the ceiling close above him, and when he opened his eyes he found himself in a little room with a square table covered with oil-cloth in the centre, and rows of beds like shelves around the walls.  The room rose and fell as the streets did when he had had nothing to eat, and he scrambled out of the warm blankets and crawled fearfully up a flight of narrow stairs.  There was water on either side of him, beyond and behind him—­water blue and white and dancing in the sun, with great blocks of dirty ice tossing on its surface.

And behind him lay the odious city of New York, with its great bridge and high buildings, and before him the open sea.  The chief engineer crawled up from the engine-room and came towards him, rubbing the perspiration from his face with a dirty towel.

“Good-morning,” he called out.  “You are feeling pretty well?”

“Yes.”

“It is Christmas day.  Do you know where you are going?  You are going to Italy, to Genoa.  It is over there,” he said, pointing with his finger.  “Go back to your bed and keep warm.”

He picked Guido up in his arms, and ran with him down the companion-way, and tossed him back into his berth.  Then he pointed to the shelf at one end of the little room, above the sheet-iron stove.  The plaster figure that Guido had wrapped in his breast had been put there and lashed to its place.

“That will bring us good luck and a quick voyage,” said the chief engineer.