He ended this talk by giving a loud laugh and walking a little way forward, where he stood, pipe in hand, listening to a German Jew and his wife who were singing a duet.
It was three or four days after this conversation with Captain Robson, a soft, blue glowing afternoon, the sparkling heaves of water lifting south along the course of the steamer, with a pearly feathering of the salt foam going straight as the metals of a railway astern where, in the distant blue air, hung the slowly dissolving shadow of the island of Madeira quitted by us that morning.
Many had gone ashore; we were now a thin company aft, the poop and saloon almost yacht-like with room and comparative privacy.
The name of the master of the steamer was Captain Strutt. I had been having a short chat with Captain Robson on the quarter-deck whilst the skipper of the steamer was on the bridge talking with the first mate; I went slowly aft and got upon the poop, and whilst I was there, looking over the side into the exquisitely pure liquid recess of ocean on the port-beam, with some orange star of sail glowing in it, whilst all between the burnished swell was working in glassy swathes rich with the gleams of the splendour in the south-west, Captain Strutt joined me.
'Robson,' said he, with a face of amusement, 'is a comical old gentleman. In my boyhood they called that sort of thing a sea-dog. It's a dying type. The skipper who wears the hat of the London streets and comes on deck in galoshes when the men are washing down, decays apace. We should take a long look at Robson, for when he is gone we shall not easily behold his like again.'
'His is a dry old mind,' said I, 'tough as sailor's beef, with the pickle of his experiences.'
'He was telling me last night, Mr. Moore,' said the captain, 'that you're interested in the loss of the "Lady Emma."'
'I have asked him, as a seaman, questions on the subject,' said I.
'I read the account of her being dismasted in one of the papers,' he exclaimed. 'It was made a bad job of, I thought, by three people being left aboard the hull, two of them women. D'ye ever see the "Shipping Gazette"?'
'In a number of it a week or two before we sailed, there was a strange piece quoted out of a Cape paper.'