time; and, just before I go to bed, I
discover him peeping over them with the chief
mate, by the light of the binnacle-lamp,
and I will be sworn he has got mine again,
holding it up to the light.

Confound those passports! It appears to me
that the traveller who has his passport most
in accordance with rule and regulation is
subject to the most annoyance. At Stettin I
had to go to the Russian consul's bureau to
procure a certificate of legitimitation to my
passport before they would give me my ticket
at the steam-packet office. The Muscovite
functionary looked at my foreign office
document with infinite contempt, and informed
me that, being an English one, it was by no
means valid in Russia. When I explained
to him that it had been visé by his own
ambassador at Berlin, he disappeared with it,
still looking very dubious, into an adjoining
apartment, which, from sundry hangings and
mouldings, and the flounces of a silk dress
which I espied through the half-opened door,
I conjecture to have been the boudoir of
Madame la Consulesse. I suppose he showed
the passport to his wife, and, enlightened,
doubtless, by her superior judgment, he
presently returned radiant, saying that the
passport was parfaitement en règle, and that it
was charmant. I can see him now, holding
my passport at arm's length, and examining
the Russian visâ through his eyeglass with
an air half critical half approving, as if it
were some natural curiosity improved by
cunning workmanship; and murmuring
charmant meanwhile. He seemed so fond
of it that it was quite a difficulty for him to
give it me back again. He did so at last,
together with the legitimitation, which was
an illegible scrawl on a scrap of paper like a
pawnbroker's duplicate. I think his clerks
must have known that my passport was in
rule, and charming, for they bestowed quite
fraternal glances on me as I went out. To
have a passport in regular order seems to be
the only thing necessary to be thought great
and wise and good in these parts; and, when
a virtuous man dies, I wonder they don't
engrave on his tombstone that he was a
tender father, an attached husband, and that
his passport was parfaitement en règle.

I wish that, instead of being thirty passengers,
we were only twenty-nine; or, at all
events, I devotedly wish that the thirtieth
were any other than Captain Smith. He is
a sea-captain: what right has he to be in
another man's vessel? Where is his ship?
He has no right even to the name of Smith—
he ought to be Smit, or Schmidt; for he tells
me that he was born at Dantzig; that it is
only in the fourth generation that he can
claim English descent. Indeed, he speaks
English fluently enough, but with the accent
of a Hottentot. When Captain Smith was
an egg, he must indubitably have been
selected by that eminent nautical poultry-fancier,
Mother Carey, for chicken-hatching
purposes, and a full-feathered bird of ill-omen
he has grown up to be. He has had a spite
against the Preussischer Adler from the outset;
and I hear him grumbling to himself or the
Baltic Sea—it does not much matter which,
for he is always communing with one or the
other—somewhat in this fashion:—"Den
dousand daler! twenty dousand daler! she
gostet tinkering up dis time, and she not
worth a tam: no, not one tam;" and so on.
He has a camp-stool on which he sits over
the engine hatchway, casting baleful glances
at the cylinders, and grumbling about the
number of dalers they have "gostet," and
that they are "not worth a tam." I find him
examining a courier's bag I have purchased
at Berlin, and evidently summing up its
value by the curt but expressive phrase I
have ventured to quote. I discover him
counting, watch in hand, the number of
revolutions per minute of the engines, and
muttering disparaging remarks to the steward.
He takes a vast quantity of solitary drams
from a private bottle; openly declaring that
the ship's stores are to be measured by his
invariable standard of worthlessness.
Sometimes, in right of nautical freemasonry, he
mounts the paddlebox bridge, and hovers
over Captain Steffens (he is very tall) like an
Old Man of the Sea, whispering grim counsel
into that commander's ear, till Captain Steffens
seems very much inclined to charge at
him full butt with his long telescope, or to
pitch him bodily into the Baltic. He haunts
the deck at unholy hours, carrying a long
pair of boots lined with sheepskin, which he
incites the cook, with drams from his solitary
bottle, to grease, and which he suspends, for
seasoning, to forbidden ropes and stays. The
subject on which he is especially eloquent
is a certain ship—"Schibb" he calls it—laden
with madapolams, and by him, at some remote
period of time, commanded, and which went
down off the island of Oësel, or Oosel, or
Weasel, in the year eighteen hundred and
forty-nine. He brings a tattered chart of
his own on deck (for the ship's charts, he
confidentially remarks, are not worth his
favourite monosyllable), and shows me the
exact spot where the ill-fated vessel came to
grief. "Dere I lose my schibb, year 'vorty-nine,"
he says. "Dere: jost vere my dumb
is." (His dumb, or thumb, is a huge excrescence
like a leech boiled brown, and with
a sable hat, or nail-band.) "Dere de Schön
Jungfrau went down. Hans Schwieber was
my mate, and de supercargo was a tam tief."
This rider to Falconer's Shipwreck, and an
interminable narrative about a certain
Stevedore of the port of Revel, who had the
property of getting drunk on linseed oil, are his
two great conversational hobby-horses. It is
very easy to see that he predicts a fate similar
to that of the Schön Jungfrau for the
Preussischer Adler. Prussian sailors, according to
him, are good for nothing. He wants to know
where Captain Steffens passed his examination;