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All this the boy had noted; and accordingly, having pushed across in the dinghy, he climbed the Touch-me-not’s ladder and dropped upon deck with a bundle of rugs and his father’s greatcoat under his arm.

He looked about him and listened. There was no sound at all but the lap of tide between the ships, and the voice of a preacher travelling over the water from a shed far down the harbour, where the Salvation Army was holding a midnight service. Captain Tangye had snugged down his ship for the night: ropes were coiled, deckhouses padlocked, the spokes of the wheel covered against dew and frost. The boy found the slack of a stout hawser coiled beneath the taffrail–a circular fort into which he crept with his rugs, and nestled down warmly; and then for half an hour lay listening. But only the preacher’s voice broke the silence of the harbour. On–on it went, rising and falling. . . .

Away in the little town the church clock chimed the quarter. “It must have missed striking the hour,” thought the boy, and he peered over the edge of his shelter. The preacher’s voice had ceased; but another was speaking, and close beside him.

“You’d be surprised,” it said, “how simple one’s pleasures grow with age. This is the twelfth Christmas I’ve spent at home, and I assure you I quite look forward to it: that’s a confession, eh?–from one who has sailed under Nelson and smelt powder in his time.” The boy knew that he must be listening to the Touch-me-not, whose keelson came from an old line-of-battle ship. “To be sure,” the voice went on graciously, “a great deal depends on one’s company.”

“Talking of powder,” said the Nubian, creaking gently on her stern-moorings, “reminds me of a terrible adventure. My very first voyage was to the mouth of a river on the West Coast of Africa, where two native tribes were at war. Somehow, my owner–a scoundrelly fellow in the Midlands–had wind of the quarrel, and that the tribe nearest the coast needed gunpowder. We sailed from Cardiff with fifteen hundred barrels duly labelled, and the natives came out to meet us at the river-mouth and rafted them ashore; but the barrels, if you will believe me, held nothing but sifted coal-dust. Off we went before the trick was discovered, and with six thousand pounds’ worth of ivory in my hold. But the worst villainy was to come; for my owner, pretending that he had opened up a profitable trade, and having his ivory to show for it, sold me to a London firm, who loaded me with real gunpowder and sent me out, six months later, to the same river, but with a new skipper and a different crew. The natives knew me at once, and came swarming out in canoes as soon as we dropped anchor. The captain, who of course suspected nothing, allowed them to crowd on board; and I declare that within five minutes they had clubbed him and every man of the crew and tossed their bodies to the sharks. Then they cut my hawsers and towed me over the river-bar; and, having landed a good half of my barrels, they built and lit a fire around them in derision. I can hear the explosion still; my poor upper-works have been crazy ever since. It destroyed almost all the fighters of the tribe, who had formed a ring to dance around the fire. The rest fled inland, and I never saw them again, but lay abandoned for months as they had anchored me, between the ruined huts and a sandy spit alive with mosquitoes–until somehow a British tramp-steamer heard of me at one of the trading stations up the coast. She brought down a crew to man and work me home. But my owner could not pay the salvage; so the parties who owned the steamer– a Runcorn firm–paid him fifty pounds and kept me for their services. A surveyor examined me, and reported that I should never be fit for much: the explosion had shaken me to pieces. I might do for the coasting trade–that was all; and in that I’ve remained.”