as though I could fling down my hat and dance on it from sheer mortification, as I once saw the skipper of an Italian barque do because his duffer of a mate got into a mess with his anchors when making a flying moor in a roadstead full of ships.  I asked myself, seeing him there apparently so much at ease—­is he silly? is he callous?  He seemed ready to start whistling a tune.  And note, I did not care a rap about the behaviour of the other two.  Their persons somehow fitted the tale that was public property, and was going to be the subject of an official inquiry.  “That old mad rogue upstairs called me a hound,” said the captain of the Patna.  I can’t tell whether he recognised me—­I rather think he did; but at any rate our glances met.  He glared—­I smiled; hound was the very mildest epithet that had reached me through the open window.  “Did he?” I said from some strange inability to hold my tongue.  He nodded, bit his thumb again, swore under his breath:  then lifting his head and looking at me with sullen and passionate impudence—­“Bah! the Pacific is big, my friendt.  You damned Englishmen can do your worst; I know where there’s plenty room for a man like me:  I am well aguaindt in Apia, in Honolulu, in . . .”  He paused reflectively, while without effort I could depict to myself the sort of people he was “aguaindt” with in those places.  I won’t make a secret of it that I had been “aguaindt” with not a few of that sort myself.  There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company.  I’ve known such a time, and, what’s more, I shan’t now pretend to pull a long face over my necessity, because a good many of that bad company from want of moral—­moral—­what shall I say?—­posture, or from some other equally profound cause, were twice as instructive and twenty times more amusing than the usual respectable thief of commerce you fellows ask to sit at your table without any real necessity—­from habit, from cowardice, from good-nature, from a hundred sneaking and inadequate reasons.

’"You Englishmen are all rogues,” went on my patriotic Flensborg or Stettin Australian.  I really don’t recollect now what decent little port on the shores of the Baltic was defiled by being the nest of that precious bird.  “What are you to shout?  Eh?  You tell me?  You no better than other people, and that old rogue he make Gottam fuss with me.”  His thick carcass trembled on its legs that were like a pair of pillars; it trembled from head to foot.  “That’s what you English always make—­make a tam’ fuss—­for any little thing, because I was not born in your tam’ country.  Take away my certificate.  Take it.  I don’t want the certificate.  A man like me don’t want your verfluchte certificate.  I shpit on it.”  He spat.  “I vill an Amerigan citizen begome,” he cried, fretting and fuming and shuffling his feet as if to free his ankles from some invisible and mysterious grasp that would not let him get away from that spot.  He made himself so warm that the top of his bullet