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"Very good"—he gave it to a tall man, loose-limbed, shaven, dark-haired, wearing a cloth cap, and rough clothes that looked new.

And, as they walked together along the dock-railway, said Cobby: "Where have I seen you before?"

On which the man chuckled, saying: "Not at Buckingham Palace, I'm afraid, sir."

When they reached the bustle of the ship, now shouting "visitors ashore," Cobby at once lost sight of him; but four evenings later, out in the Bay of Biscay, on wandering with "The Zulu-Kaffir Language" into the bow-regions, to watch the bow-foams wash and dash, he beheld the same man there, leaning over the rail among some steerage-passengers.

Cobby addressed him, with "So you are here."

On which the man touched his cap with a chuckle. "Yours as ever, sir," he said.

But there was some difference now about the man somehow, in air, or face. Cobby, just aware of a difference, could not say in what it lay—was not interested.

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Before Madeira was passed, Rolls had become an institution in the ship. He liked winds in his hair, and dismal nights, when he had the vessel and the universe to himself, and sometimes the saloon-dinner was his breakfast, he was such a night-fowl, scarcely mixing with the others—differing from Cobby, who let himself be led into whist-drive, sweepstake, saloon-ball and nonsense-talk under the quarter-deck awning. Cobby's name as a scientist having been known to two or three beforehand, as he saw himself sought after, he lent himself. But he wrote in his diary: "This is dreadful! This emptiness and waste of days. But what idle people! and I as idle as any of them. May Spiciewegiehotiu perish...."