over his cap, which he held before him by the peak, between the thumb and the forefinger of his wounded hand.  I bowed too.  We bowed together:  we scraped our feet at each other with much ceremony, while a dirty specimen of a waiter looked on critically, as though he had paid for the performance.  “Serviteur,” said the Frenchman.  Another scrape.  “Monsieur” . . .  “Monsieur.” . . .  The glass door swung behind his burly back.  I saw the southerly buster get hold of him and drive him down wind with his hand to his head, his shoulders braced, and the tails of his coat blown hard against his legs.

’I sat down again alone and discouraged—­discouraged about Jim’s case.  If you wonder that after more than three years it had preserved its actuality, you must know that I had seen him only very lately.  I had come straight from Samarang, where I had loaded a cargo for Sydney:  an utterly uninteresting bit of business,—­what Charley here would call one of my rational transactions,—­and in Samarang I had seen something of Jim.  He was then working for De Jongh, on my recommendation.  Water-clerk.  “My representative afloat,” as De Jongh called him.  You can’t imagine a mode of life more barren of consolation, less capable of being invested with a spark of glamour—­unless it be the business of an insurance canvasser.  Little Bob Stanton—­Charley here knew him well—­had gone through that experience.  The same who got drowned afterwards trying to save a lady’s-maid in the Sephora disaster.  A case of collision on a hazy morning off the Spanish coast—­you may remember.  All the passengers had been packed tidily into the boats and shoved clear of the ship, when Bob sheered alongside again and scrambled back on deck to fetch that girl.  How she had been left behind I can’t make out; anyhow, she had gone completely crazy—­wouldn’t leave the ship—­held to the rail like grim death.  The wrestling-match could be seen plainly from the boats; but poor Bob was the shortest chief mate in the merchant service, and the woman stood five feet ten in her shoes and was as strong as a horse, I’ve been told.  So it went on, pull devil, pull baker, the wretched girl screaming all the time, and Bob letting out a yell now and then to warn his boat to keep well clear of the ship.  One of the hands told me, hiding a smile at the recollection, “It was for all the world, sir, like a naughty youngster fighting with his mother.”  The same old chap said that “At the last we could see that Mr. Stanton had given up hauling at the gal, and just stood by looking at her, watchful like.  We thought afterwards he must’ve been reckoning that, maybe, the rush of water would tear her away from the rail by-and-by and give him a show to save her.  We daren’t come alongside for our life; and after a bit the old ship went down all on a sudden with a lurch to starboard—­plop.  The suck in was something awful.  We never saw anything alive or dead come up.”  Poor Bob’s spell of shore-life had been one of the complications