under the hinge of his jaw.  Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but the odious and fleshy figure, as though seen for the first time in a revealing moment, fixed itself in his memory for ever as the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love:  in our own hearts we trust for our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the air that fills our lungs.

The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards had lost itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity beyond the sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the augmented glitter of the stars, with the more profound sombreness in the lustre of the half-transparent dome covering the flat disc of an opaque sea.  The ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns, in the appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations.  ’Hot is no name for it down below,’ said a voice.

Jim smiled without looking round.  The skipper presented an unmoved breadth of back:  it was the renegade’s trick to appear pointedly unaware of your existence unless it suited his purpose to turn at you with a devouring glare before he let loose a torrent of foamy, abusive jargon that came like a gush from a sewer.  Now he emitted only a sulky grunt; the second engineer at the head of the bridge-ladder, kneading with damp palms a dirty sweat-rag, unabashed, continued the tale of his complaints.  The sailors had a good time of it up here, and what was the use of them in the world he would be blowed if he could see.  The poor devils of engineers had to get the ship along anyhow, and they could very well do the rest too; by gosh they—­’Shut up!’ growled the German stolidly.  ’Oh yes!  Shut up—­and when anything goes wrong you fly to us, don’t you?’ went on the other.  He was more than half cooked, he expected; but anyway, now, he did not mind how much he sinned, because these last three days he had passed through a fine course of training for the place where the bad boys go when they die—­b’gosh, he had—­besides being made jolly well deaf by the blasted racket below.  The durned, compound, surface-condensing, rotten scrap-heap rattled and banged down there like an old deck-winch, only more so; and what made him risk his life every night and day that God made amongst the refuse of a breaking-up yard flying round at fifty-seven revolutions, was more than he could tell.  He must have been born reckless, b’gosh.  He . . .  ‘Where did you get drink?’ inquired the German, very savage; but motionless in the light of the binnacle, like a clumsy effigy of a man cut out of a block of fat.  Jim went on smiling at the retreating horizon; his heart was full of generous impulses, and his thought was contemplating his own