ever does differ from other voyages. It is impossible. They made the same stops, the same changes, ate the same food, had the same fellow passengers. Nothing short of pirates or a shoal of ship-devouring Jonah's whales could differentiate one P. & O. passage from another.
But Hilda Gregory found this one a little dull at first, and was driven in self-respect to appropriate the ship's surgeon and two homing subalterns.
For Basil and their mother were inseparable, and the father who heretofore had been her faithful, if not too picturesque, knight lived in the smoking-room, telling again and again the story of his cowing of the great Chinese "I Am," Wu Li Chang. Robert Gregory, never a wordless man, had never talked so much in all his life.
It was impossible to pass the smoking-room door without catching some such scrap of English masterpiece as: "I put him through it." "The damned nigger was only bluffing. Well, I damn well called his bluff!" ". . . and that's where a knowledge of the Chinaman comes in—an inside, intelligent knowledge. They like to be thought clever, I tell you. Don't you see that it flattered him that I should think—seem to think, of course—that he was a sort of Mister Know-All?—and he was sly enough to play up to it. Oh! he was sly, I grant you that. But no match for me; no real ability." "Yes; as I told you, he hummed and hawed a bit at first, until I simply turned him inside out, and then I could see he knew nothing. It was only tickling his vanity to let him imagine I thought he was a little local god. That's why I left him to Mrs. Gregory. I saw it was a mere waste of my time. And it pleased her, and, too, it took her mind off the boy a bit. She was fretting over him—the young dog!—until I thought she'd make
